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Hans van Mierlo, changer of Dutch politics [and founder of D66] , dies at 78
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| Contributor | RMF |
| Last Edited | RMF Mar 14, 2010 05:18pm |
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| Category | Obituary |
| Author | Mark Kranenburg |
| News Date | Friday, March 12, 2010 11:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Former Dutch foreign minister and left-wing liberal leader, Hans van Mierlo, died at age 78 on Thursday. The founder of the D66 political party had been ill for some time.
"Hans is now living out his injury time", his fellow D66 party members said after he had had undergone a liver transplant in 2000. He managed to stretch that extra time for nearly a decade. He enjoyed those ten years because, as he said in an interview five years after the transplant: "Being dead is something you can do for a very long time." But on Thursday, Hans van Mierlo, the founder and figurehead of the left-wing liberal party in the Netherlands passed away at age 78.
He himself has now become part of history. Henricus Antonius Franciscus Maria Oliva van Mierlo -- or Hafmo, as his party members affectionately referred to him -- was a philosopher, a bohemian, a romantic, an orator, a bon vivant, a master of paradox, an eternal doubter and yes, of course, also a politician.
Above anything else, he was the political embodiment of the Dutch cultural revolution of the 1960s. The movement that never really became a revolution, because the Netherlands was a country where so-called 'repressive tolerance' quickly made D66 and Van Mierlo himself a part of the system they so maligned. Van Mierlo, who started out a critic of the state, died an honorary Minister of State. He himself would undoubtedly have appreciated the paradox. |
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