Dilan Yeşilgöz

Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius (born 18 June 1977) is a Dutch politician who served as Leader of the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy since 2023. She also served as minister of justice and security in the fourth Rutte cabinet from 10 January 2022 to 2 July 2024. Yeşilgöz previously served as a member of the House of Representatives from 2017 to 2021 and as State Secretary for Economic Affairs and Climate Policy from 2021 until 2022.

Early life
Yeşilgöz was born in Ankara, Turkey, and migrated to the Netherlands as a child. Her mother is of Turkish origin and her father is Kurdish and originally from Tunceli. Her mother, Fatma Özgümüş, is the director of the Netherlands Refugee Organization (VON). Her father, Yücel Yeşilgöz, a left-wing trade unionist, escaped from Turkey and sought asylum in the Netherlands in 1980, after the 1980 coup. Dilan Yeşilgöz, at the age of 7 and as a refugee, escaped and claimed asylum in the Netherlands, along with her mother and sister.

After receiving her secondary education at the Vallei College in Amersfoort between 1991 and 1997, Yeşilgöz studied social and cultural sciences at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where she obtained a master's degree in culture, organization and management in 2003.

Political career
Yeşilgöz-Zegerius started her political career at the Socialist Party, where Yesilgöz was a board member for the Amersfoort branch of the party. After this she started writing for the youth delegation of the Labour Party and followed an internship at GroenLinks.

From 2014 to 2017, Yeşilgöz-Zegerius held a seat in the municipal council of Amsterdam. She was placed fourth on the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy list in the 2014 municipal election. As a councilor, Yeşilgöz committed to tackling and criminalizing street harassment of LGBT people and women. She worked on this in the city council for three years, but proposals were always rejected by a majority. When she left for the House of Representatives in 2017, then mayor Eberhard van der Laan praised her tenacity. He called it his farewell gift to Yeşilgöz that there would be an integrated approach to street intimidation in Amsterdam, based on a proposal she had submitted with Marijke Shashavari of the CDA at the time. A majority of the city council approved this proposal. De Volkskrant characterized her tenacious nature as a "pit bull with empathy".

Yeşilgöz-Zegerius was elected to the House of Representatives in the 2017 general election. She initially served as her party's spokesperson for justice and security, but her portfolio later included climate policy and energy policy. On 25 May 2021, Yesilgöz was appointed State Secretary for Economic Affairs and Climate Policy in the demissionary third Rutte cabinet, serving alongside Mona Keijzer. On 10 January 2022, she was appointed Minister of Justice and Security in the fourth Rutte cabinet.

The cabinet collapsed over disagreements about immigration reform on 7 July 2023, triggering a November 2023 snap election. On 12 July – two days after Prime Minister Mark Rutte declared he would no longer lead the party – Yeşilgöz announced her candidacy to become the next leader of the VVD. The party board formally nominated her for the position the following day, and Yeşilgöz officially became party leader of the VVD on 14 August. The VVD came in third in the snap election with 24 seats. Yeşilgöz became the party's parliamentary leader, but the duties were performed by Sophie Hermans due to Yeşilgöz's continued role as minister. In June 2024, opposition parties filed a censure and a no-confidence motion, neither of which received a majority, against Yeşilgöz, because she had claimed, following the cabinet collapse, that successive family reunifications resulted in thousands of additional asylum seekers per year. The actual figure was later revealed to be in the tens per year.

The Schoof cabinet was sworn in on 2 July 2024, bringing an end to Yeşilgöz's term as minister.

Political positions
As minister of justice and security, Yesilgöz advocated for criminal justice reform and strict policies against terrorism and organized crime. She supported laws to protect journalists who had been threatened for their work and supports deporting extremist imams from the Schengen area. In 2019, Yesilgöz called for a ban on "single shots" and heavy flares within the F2 category of the Fireworks policy in the European Union, a policy idea which was opposed by the rest of the VVD. She also supported mandatory use of body cameras for police officers. Although from a refugee background, Yesilgöz has said she would pursue further controls on immigration if elected Prime Minister.

In 2019, Yesilgöz argued that Dutch ISIS terrorists detained by Kurdish forces should be tried on the spot rather than be repatriated to the Netherlands. She also argued in favour of blocking the repatriation of ISIS members, an idea which was opposed by coalition parties D66 and ChristenUnie who argued they should face trial in the Netherlands.

In 2022, Yesilgöz delivered the annual Hendrik Jan Schoo lecture entitled "Doing What It Takes to Protect Our Democratic Rule of Law" in which she criticised wokeism, far-right politicians, and conspiracy theorists, and argued that the Dutch constitutional state is allegedly under pressure from left-wing activism. Yesilgöz considers Frits Bolkestein as her main liberal role model.

In contrast to her predecessor Mark Rutte, Yesilgöz said she would not exclude Geert Wilders and the PVV from coalition talks ahead of the 2023 Dutch general election.

Personal life
Yesilgöz married René Zegerius in 2013. She is an Ajax supporter and a country music fan.

Although she has dual nationality, she considers herself Dutch and not Turkish. On the television program College Tour, she stated in September 2023 that she had never had a Turkish passport and that she had only known for a year that she still had Turkish nationality. With this knowledge, she says she formally renounced her Turkish nationality, but it had not yet been granted by the Turkish government at the time of the interview.