King Willem Alexander and prime minister Mark Rutte are among the people playing tribute to Eberhard van der Laan, the mayor of Amsterdam, who died on Thursday at the age of 62 from cancer.

Flags throughout the city were flown at half-mast following news that the mayor had died, 10 months after going public with his illness.

‘We remember Eberhard van der Laan as a driven mayor with a real heart for his city and a passionate belief in a society in which everyone counts,’ said king Willem-Alexander and queen Maxima in a statement.

The king is known to have paid a private visit to Van der Laan last week. Last month Van der Laan took the king on a walk through the city’s Jordaan district, and pictures of the mayor looking frail showed how ill he had become.

Direct and open

Prime minister Mark Rutte described the news of his death as ‘very sad’. ‘We knew it was going to happen, but nevertheless the news has hit many people hard,’ Rutte said.

‘He was a manager who went to the people and made real contact with them through his directness and openness,’ Rutte said. ‘You knew where you were with him, and that is what made people so fond of him.’

‘For him there was no city more beautiful than Amsterdam’, the Parool heads its predominantly fond remembrance of Eberhard van der Laan. ‘A problem solver rather than a politician, Eberhard van der Laan was  practical, focused, and put his heart and soul in his work.’ Van der Laan was a man who proclaimed the superiority of his city with such charm ‘that no one outside the city could take offence’, the paper said.

Politician

Politics itself he held in little regard, in spite of 40 years of involvement, the paper said. To him it meant infighting, party political games. ‘Let’s not make this political,’ he would tell the council as he deftly steered the debate into a direction he had determined long before,’ the Parool said.

‘Van der Laan was a man who didn’t hold back. He had a fierce temper at times – he once told a man who said he never talked to ‘real Amsterdammers’ he was a total c..t – he worked too hard, ate too much junk food – no one scoffed a plate of osseworst as quickly as he did –  smoked far too much but ‘if he was on your side he would go through hell and high water for you’, the paper sums him up.

Hard-working

 The Volkskrant commemorates a hard-working mayor, whose love of the city prompted him to stay in the saddle ‘perhaps for longer than he should have’. In his final week in office Van der Laan had to field some tough questions about the unit he formed to fight radicalisation and which ended up charged with fraud.

The paper cites historian and friend Geert Mak who said last week that the significance of Van der Laan was to his refusal to enter into discussions he thought were divisive.

‘He is someone who won’t participate in the internal bickering and complaining which seems to have become rife in this country in the last few years. In all that divisiveness Eberhard played a unifying role, something many Amsterdammers were desperate for. His character and qualities were exactly what were needed in Amsterdam at this time,’ the paper quotes Mak as saying.

Straight-talking Van der Laan, born in Leiden, almost always found ‘the right tone’ for Amsterdammers, the Volkskrant writes, whether it was in his speeches or in debate, with as ‘a final beat of the drum’, his final words: ‘Look after our city and look after each other.’

Agile administrator

The Financieele Dagblad calls Van der Laan ‘an agile administrator whose heart was in the right place’, and starts its analysis with a telling example of the Van der Laan way of taking things in his stride.

During the Occupy demonstration on Beursplein in 2011 Van der Laan talked to the demonstrators on a regular basis and even adopted their gestures: waving hands to signify applause. ‘He thought it was funny. He combined a cheeky, street-wise persona with the experienced lawyer that he was as well and that made him the mayor Amsterdam needed,’ the D66 MP Jan Paternotte told the paper.

According to the Telegraaf Eberhard van der Laan ‘spoke the language of ordinary people making him a natural leader’. One of his last decisions as a mayor and ‘an Ajax supporter to the bone’ was to name the Amsterdam Arena the Johan Cruijff Arena, the paper points out.

The Telegraaf calls him ‘not a soft social-democrat’ but someone who called on people to take responsibility: ‘It is that no-nonsense attitude that made made him loved, also by people outside his party.’

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