After 16 years as MP, former Socialist Party leader Jan Marijnissen (57) is leaving national politics writes the Volkskrant.The lecture circuit beckons and he’s going to finish his book.

His career, which spans 35 years, began in his native Oss where his fight for better working conditions in the local factories and campaigns against housing corporations earned him a seat on the local council. He was 23, the youngest member of a local council in the country.
In 1988, he became party chairman of the Socialist Party which by then had shed its Maoist ideology. During the nineties Marijnissen pushed his party further into the mainstream by dismissing any remnants of Marxism and Leninism as ‘old fashioned ballast’.
It was not enough to lead to election success the following year but by creating the image of a protest party, the SP managed to win two seats in 1994. Marijnissen was in and immediately gained notoriety by telling the parliamentary chairman to ‘pipe down’when he felt he wasn’t getting enough time to have his say. His outspokenness and unmistakable Brabant accent made him a frequent guest on radio and television programmes.
As opposition leader Marijnissen was at his most vehement against the ‘neo liberal’ Labour, VVD and D66 coalition cabinet. Labour especially came in for much criticism after it had abandoned its traditional Labour ideology.
In 2002 Marijnissen decided to change tack. Instead of a protest party the SP became the party of alternatives. It grew steadily, from two seats to five, then nine and finally to twenty five seats in 2006.
But there was criticism as well. Marijnissen was accused of having too much power being both party chairman and parliamentary party leader. MP Ali Lazrak was made to leave the party when he refused to transfer his salary to the party coffers. Senator Düzgun Yildirim had to go because he refused to give up his seat after he had been elected on the basis of preference votes.
The SP began to go down in the polls when Marijnissen failed to become part of a government coalition. In 2008 his health began to deteriorate and right hand Agnes Kant took his place. In his farewell speech he said he did not want to become ‘the oracle of Oss’ the way former VVD leader Hans Wiegel became the oracle of Diever, speaking words of wisdom from the sidelines.
Kant never made it out of his shadow and after the disappointing local election results she called it a day. Emile Roemer will have an easier job of it with Marijnissen gone.
Marijnissen will stay on as party chairman. He’s going on the lecture circuit and finish his book about globalisation. There’s life beyond The Hague as he said in his book Effe Dimmen (Pipe down) in 1998. ‘A sensible person will find there’s not much to like about the daily The Hague grind’, he wrote.

This is an unofficial translation