Six years after Sigrid Kaag was catapulted into the highest ranks of Dutch politics, police keep a constant watch over her home. Cameras sweep across the back of the property while every piece of mail sent to her is screened before she can open it.
“Most people would still have the tendency to say, ‘Oh well, this is part and parcel of politics,’” said Kaag, the first deputy prime minister of the Netherlands. “I don’t accept that.”
Instead she described it as a glimpse – albeit extreme – of how the steady flow of vitriol, amplified by social media and, in her case, the extreme right wing, is reshaping politics. Speaking to the Guardian, Kaag warned the shift threatened to roll back decades of progress when it comes to the political participation of women, minorities and people of colour.
“I think it’s quite sick, frankly,” said Kaag, a former UN diplomat who until recently helmed Democrats 66 (D66), a progressive, socially liberal and pro-European party in the Netherlands. “The tone and the intimidation and the easy threats that are issued via social media against a broad range of people serving in the public domain … it’s become so rampant that I really feel it’s up to politicians to draw a line in the sand.”
Earlier this year Kaag, 61, announced she had decided to step down rather than lead her party in the Netherlands’ upcoming general elections. At the time she pointed to the toll that the years of “hate, intimidation and threats” had taken on her husband and children. “I just couldn’t do this to them again,” she said.
Her departure adds to the growing list of high-profile female politicians who have turned their backs on politics, from Finland’s Sanna Marin to Scotland’s Mhairi Black.
After resigning in February, Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s former first minister, signalled the deteriorating climate for female politicians, describing the current environment as “much harsher and more hostile” than any other time in her decades-long career.
“Social media provides a vehicle for the most awful abuse of women, misogyny, sexism and threats of violence for women who put their heads above the parapet,” she told a BBC documentary.
It is a view echoed by Kaag. “It’s not about me – forget me – it’s about the impact it has on society,” said Kaag. “It also impacts the quality of our democracy and it will hinder people of stature, people of calibre, women, people of colour to even be willing to join political life. So what does that mean for our democracy in the future?”
Kaag traced her own experience with online hate to 2017 when rumours began circulating about her return home to join the government after decades of high-profile international work. “That was sort of driven by a small group that took offence to the fact that a Dutch minister happened to be married to a Palestinian of Jerusalem,” she said. Her husband, Anis al-Qaq, served as a deputy minister and ambassador to Switzerland for the Palestinian Authority before co-founding the International Forum for Peace in the Middle East. “So that was a very small group but it was very vocal and very targeted and very nasty.”
As she and her party racked up success after success – Kaag became the country’s first female finance minister in 2022 – the abuse swelled. “So it’s been a crescendo, a never-abating crescendo, of either allegations, insults, intimidation, you name it,” she said. Often her family was dragged in; last year a man described by local media as a known conspiracy theorist was arrested carrying a flaming torch outside her home.
The gravity of what female politicians are up against was hinted at in 2018 after the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the global organisation of national parliaments, interviewed 81 female MPs from 40 European countries. Their findings revealed that 85% reported experiencing psychological violence, a category that included sexist remarks as well as persistent and intimidating behaviour, while 47% reported having received death threats or threats of rape or beatings.
The findings have been echoed at the national level in countries across Europe. A recent report by the Fawcett Society found 93% of female MPs surveyed in the UK felt online abuse or harassment had negatively affected their feelings about the job, as compared with 76% of men, while a 2021 Nato study found female Finnish ministers received a disproportionate number of abusive messages. In Italy, researchers recently suggested female mayors were approximately three times more likely to experience physical or psychological violence compared with their male counterparts.
In the Netherlands – where in 2014 another female D66 politician, Els Borst, was murdered after drafting a landmark law legalising euthanasia – a recent study by the country’s interior minister found female politicians were more likely to face violent threats and aggression than their male colleagues.
Often women who speak out about the abuse find themselves fending off veiled criticism that they are trying to paint themselves as a victim, said Kaag. “Very often you get asked in the Netherlands: what makes you think that people hate you so much?”
She described it as a form of “shaming” that keeps many silent about the abuse they receive. “I think a lot of women still feel as if they have to soldier on.”
What Kaag would like to see, she said, is greater legislative efforts to tackle online hate, with lawmakers wading through thorny issues such as privacy and freedom of information to crack down on problems such as doxing, anonymous accounts and the amplification of hate speech through algorithms.
“It’s too late to say, ‘Oh, it shouldn’t come to this,’” she said. “There is a very vocal, screaming minority that is either endangering people, threatening, intimidating, you know, wishing them away, so as to speak. And they overtake the silent majority.”
