Pieter Omtzigt

Pieter Herman Omtzigt (born 8 January 1974) is a Dutch politician who has served as a member of the House of Representatives since 2003 apart from a short interruption between June and October 2010. He was member of the Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA), but left in 2021 and continued as independent. In August 2023, he founded a new party called New Social Contract, its name taken from his 2021 manifesto. Three months later, his party won 20 out of 150 seats in the 2023 Dutch general election.

In his political work, Omtzigt focuses on matters of taxes and pensions. He rose to prominence for his role in bringing attention to the childcare benefits scandal.

Early life and education
Omtzigt was born in The Hague, Netherlands in 1974, as one of twins. His father Jan Omtzigt (1939-2019) was a civil servant at the Dutch state telecommunications company PTT and later director of a Roman Catholic retirement house in Zenderen. When he was four years old, Omtzigt moved with his parents and brothers from Wassenaar to Borne. He attended the gymnasium school in Hengelo.

From 1992 to 1996, Omtzigt studied at the University of Exeter (Devon, England), where he obtained his BA degree in Economics and Statistics with European Studies. In the meantime, he did a student exchange program at the LUISS University (Rome, Italy) from 1994 to 1995. During his studies, Omtzigt was also a board member of the youth department of the Dutch Christian trade union CNV between 1991 and 1993. He performed his doctoral research at the European University Institute (Florence, Italy), where he obtained a PhD in Economics in 2003, with the dissertation titled Essays in Cointegration Analysis. Omtzigt was a researcher at the University of Insubria (Varese, Italy) from 2000 to 2002. From 2002 he was a post-doctoral researcher at the Quantitative Economics department of the University of Amsterdam.

House of Representatives
In parliament, Omtzigt currently serves on the Committees on European Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Housing and Kingdom Services, Social Affairs and Employment, Finance and Public Expenditure. From 2017, he served as the parliament's rapporteur on Brexit.

From 2019, Omtzigt, together with Member of Parliament Renske Leijten (SP), stood up for affected parents in the childcare benefits scandal in which more than 20,000 families were wronged when applying for childcare allowance. In the end, civil servants and (former) ministers were heard by the parliamentary questioning committee on Childcare Allowance, which ultimately led to the fall of the third Rutte cabinet in January 2021.

In July 2020, Omtzigt was defeated by Deputy Prime Minister Hugo de Jonge in a vote for the position of leader of the Christian Democratic Appeal. Omtzigt was re-elected in the 2021 general election, winning 342,472 preference votes, more than any other non-party leader. Following the election, Omtzigt took time off, after complaining of exhaustion. Despite his leave, he decided to attend his installation on 31 March 2021.

On 25 March 2021, confidential notes from the government formation were revealed to include, among other things, "position Omtzigt, function elsewhere" ("positie Omtzigt, functie elders"). This prompted a heated debate in parliament and an impasse in the government formation. Amid the continuous news, Omtzigt took a formal leave of absence of four months starting on 25 May. He was temporarily replaced as a member of parliament by Henri Bontenbal.

On 10 June 2021 a 78-page memo by Omtzigt was leaked, addressed to the CDA's Spies-committee that analysed the results of the parliamentary elections of March 2021. Omtzigt lashed out hard at the CDA, group employees and CDA members of parliament who were not named and wrote that he was promised the leadership of the party if Hugo de Jonge would withdraw as party leader. After De Jonge's departure, however, the party leadership was offered to Wopke Hoekstra. According to Omtzigt, that was completely beyond his control. According to Omtzigt, political party members and members of the House of Representatives have described him as a "psychopath, sick man, rabid dog, jerk, disturbed" and "unstable". Some of those claims were added to the memo by Omtzigt in a WhatsApp screenshot. Two days later, Omtzigt announced that he had left the CDA, and that he would continue as an independent member of parliament after his leave of absence. On 15 September 2021, Omtzigt returned to the Dutch House of Representatives as a member of a one-person parliamentary group under the name Member Omtzigt. In an interview with De Twentsche Courant Tubantia a week earlier, Omtzigt had indicated that he ruled out a return to the CDA.

On 20 August 2023, Omtzigt announced his participation in the early Dutch parliamentary elections scheduled for 22 November 2023, with the party New Social Contract (NSC). The party entered the House as the fourth largest with twenty seats, and Omtzigt expressed his unwillingness to negotiate about forming a governing coalition with the right-wing populist Party for Freedom (PVV), the election winner, as he believed the party did not respect the rule of law. As part of the cabinet formation, Omtzigt entered talks under informateur Ronald Plasterk with the PVV, VVD, and BBB to address those concerns. He finally left open the possibility to enter into an extraparliamentary cabinet, but he stepped out of the negotiations in February 2024, citing disagreements about finances. Omtzigt rejoined talks under a new informateur, and a coalition agreement to form the Schoof cabinet was reached on 16 May 2024. In the House of Representatives, Omtzigt has served as parliamentary leader and as spokesperson for European affairs.

Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe
In addition to his role in parliament, Omtzigt has been serving as member of the Dutch delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) since 2004. He is currently a member of the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights; the Committee on the Honouring of Obligations and Commitments by Member States of the Council of Europe (Monitoring Committee); the Sub-Committee on Human Rights; the Sub-Committee on the implementation of judgments of the European Court of Human Rights; and the Sub-Committee on the Rights of Minorities.

In his capacity at the Parliamentary Assembly, Omtzigt has served as the Assembly's rapporteur on mass surveillance since 2014. He has also been the Parliamentary Assembly's General Rapporteur on the protection of whistleblowers since 2021.

Omtzigt has also served as rapporteur on the case of the car bombing of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia (2018), justice for the victims of ISIL (2019); and on Poland (2019). Between 2016 and 2017, he prepared the Assembly's proposal on an Investment Court System (ICS) for arbitrating in commercial disputes between states and foreign investors.

Political positions
Omtzigt was long seen as representative of the CDA's Eurosceptic wing. He has been critical of European Central Bank policies and, in 2020, pushed his party to support the idea of the Netherlands opting-out of unwanted EU programs. During the campaign for the 2023 Dutch general election, Omtzigt positioned himself as a centrist: conservative on immigration and climate change but leftist on reducing poverty and improving healthcare.

Controversy
In 2017, media in the Netherlands described how fake news reports of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 crash were propagated with the support of Omtzigt who introduced a Russian man as an "eyewitness" of the crash on a public expert debate in May 2017. The man, who was an asylum-seeker from Ukraine, never witnessed the crash, and his speech, texted to him by Omtzigt prior to the interview, repeated one of the Russia-promoted versions of Mig jets downing the Boeing. Shortly thereafter, journalists determined that the man had not been at home on the night of the crash and he had already been interviewed by officials who had discounted him as a witness. He acknowledged via Twitter that he had acted carelessly and a few days later resigned as the spokesperson for the MH17 file.

Personal life
Omtzigt married Ayfer Koç in 2009 and they have two children. He also has two step-children. He is a Catholic and says he is inspired by Catholic social teaching; he also used to be a friend of Bishop Martinus Patrus Maria Muskens of Breda.

Omtzigt and his family live in Enschede.

Publications

 * Omtzigt, Pieter (23 February 2021). Een nieuw sociaal contract (in Dutch). Prometheus, Uitgeverij. ISBN 978-90-446-4882-9
 * Naar een beter bestuur van en voor Nederland
 * Essays on Cointegration Analysis
 * Omtzigt, Pieter; Tozman, Markus K.; Tyndall, Andrea (2012). The Slow Disappearance of the Syriacs from Turkey and of the Grounds of the Mor Gabriel Monastery. LIT Verlag Münster. ISBN 978-3-643-90268-9