Why Schotte will win tomorrow

Trouw journalist Hans Marijnissen analyzed the phenomenon Gerrit Schotte and Curacao-based journalist Dick Drayer added a brief introduction to the story. Why Schotte is going to win the elections tomorrow.

Gerrit Schotte split with Helmin Wiels on October 29, 2012, after Wiels had called him a sociopath. Wiels had won the elections, beating Schotte by a margin of 1,265 votes that took away the initiative from Schotte for the formation of the next government.

Research by journalist Yves Cooper made clear that Wiels took away 19 percent of Schotte’s MFK-electorate. In 2013 Wiels was assassinated and his 19,715 votes were up for grabs again. Of this total, 3,745 voted for Schotte in 2010.

Until then, Schotte had won the elections based on his appeal, but he needed to change course. On May 6 2013, the day Wiels was assassinated, Schotte knew how he could win the elections in 2016. The MFK-leader looked for the solution at his rival. From that moment on he would campaign the way Wiels had done it. More than that: he would also go after the digital voter; away with those flags on the road, on to the smart phone. That the road to victory could be so erratic, Schotte did not know yet at the time.

Journalist Hans Marijnissen describes in an article that appeared last Wednesday in Trouw in great detail how Schotte picked up where he had left off and began to campaign the way Wiels had done it before him.

Marijnissen accompanies Schotte in Parera and sees how an old woman is breathing with difficulty as she shuffles up a steep little street carrying a full bag of shopping. Schotte walks behind her and speeds up. He takes over the bag, gives the woman a hug, gets a loud laugh and walks arm in arm with her to her home.

Schotte helps her to sit down and then the woman tells him how she has been living in Parera for forty years, but that she has never had it as tough as now. “The air conditioning broke down,” she says. “And I receive only 862 guilders per month. How do I live in this heat?”

It is not even eleven o’clock yet, but the temperature is already 34 Celsius. Schotte has the answer. Pensions are too low and the price of electricity is too high. Once his party MFK is elected into the new government, it wants to buy incinerators so that garbage is no longer dumped but used as a source of energy. That will make electricity cheaper, just like the windmills Schotte installed in the northern part of the island.

He kisses the woman and gives her a bracelet with MFK written on it. Schotte moves on. He left the blue Italian suit he wore when he appeared in court in March at home; the sunglasses as well. Here, dressed in jeans and a white polo, he is one of them, and it is good to look people straight in the eyes. He moves from door to door, a small bottle of water in his hand, opens gates here and there. There is always a little joke, followed by a hug, and Schotte asking how it’s going.

This way he often hears about practical problems; a campaign assistant writes them down immediately. Schotte will make sure everything is going to be alright, is the message. How sharp is the contrast with the Schotte from the court ruling of March 11.

In that ruling the judge writes that through his actions Schotte has seriously damaged the confidence of citizens. His personal interest came first when he let himself be bribed by the Sicilian gambling boss Francesco Corallo, in exchange for far-reaching influence through Schotte’s MFK. Corallo even had a vote in the appointment of ministers.

Schotte was sentenced to three years of imprisonment and he is not allowed to be active in politics for five years. That’s “to protect the island’s democracy,” the court wrote in its ruling. But the appeal Schotte filed against the ruling has a suspending effect, so there he goes, campaigning from door to door.

He does not want to talk about the verdict with Marijnissen. His voters don’t want to know anything about it either. In Parera the case against Schotte is not all that bad, or it is a conspiracy organized from the Netherlands. Schotte is good for the neighborhood, residents say, and good for them personally. That is what matters.

Behind some car wrecks he opens another gate that leads to a retired woman. She lives with thirteen family members in a little home of barely forty square meters. Just like 8,000 other households she has been cut off from water due to payment arrears. Schotte’s campaign assistant writes it all down.

“And then they say that I brought the water company to the brink of bankruptcy,” Schotte says with a reference to the criticism that under his watch millions of dollars from this government-owned company have evaporated. Nobody knows what happened to the money. “But the water company causes these people to go bankrupt by asking 16 guilders for a cubic meter of water, while the water only costs 3.27 guilders.”

The woman also has a leaking roof. According to Schotte, that is due to the fact that the government only recently has transferred money earmarked for social housing. Schotte is a master in this field – linking people’s personal problems to the failing policy of a government he does not belong to.

If he gets the opportunity to lead the country again, all these individual problems will be solved. For six months now he has been walking through the neighborhoods with this message. Sometimes six hours a day, his associates complain. And even though Parera got paved roads with money from the European Social Fund, Schotte makes it look like he paved them personally.

What is the secret of this convicted former prime minister who is so far ahead in the polls for the elections? His charm is without any doubt playing a part. He walks without knocking with bravado into those little homes and puts his hand on a shoulder. Schotte is warm and involved; he is physical, has humor and comes across as involved to people who have fallen below the poverty line. They get the feeling that he is personally keeping watch over them.

The political themes are less important, as long as their personal circumstances improve. His campaign is tuned to that. For months he goes from door to door through the poor neighborhoods, but he does record these visits and distributes the images through social media.

This way Schotte is selling to a large audience that he is authentic. Schotte also radiates modernity and positivism. He wants to go forward. Curacao can do it on its own, without the Netherlands, with smart solutions like solar and wind energy, an electronic window for a government that has to end bureaucracy, and with that modern incinerator. That way the cost of living will go down.

But he does not tell people that he personally invested deep in these sectors. Do not trust the government, trust Schotte. Especially in the neighborhoods that have fallen behind, that message goes down well. Schotte’s victory tour has almost come to an end when a lady drags him into her home. The deeply Catholic lady has an enormous portrait of Jesus on her wall and what is that in the corner of the frame? An election picture of Savior Schotte.