Femke Halsema will be featured this summer on the television program Zomergasten. The mayor of Amsterdam is the fifth name to be announced. Previously, historian and professor Ugur Ümit Üngör, writer Özcan Akyol, author Simon Kuper, and actress Eva Crutzen were already announced.
“What will inevitably be discussed during my evening is politics, it can’t be otherwise with my life course. But I don’t intend to endlessly milk the Dutch political debate,” Halsema said in a reaction. “I want to look back and forward more broadly, on the ideals of leadership that have shaped me, discussions about democracy, and not to forget the beauty.”
Halsema has been active in the public domain for decades. She was the political leader of GroenLinks for many years, published several books, and was a special professor with the chair ‘politics in the 21st century’. In 2018, she was appointed mayor of Amsterdam, the first woman in that role.
Akyol can be seen in the first episode of Zomergasten. In 2012, he debuted with Eus, a semi-autobiographical book about his youth in a working-class neighborhood in Deventer, as the child of illiterate Turkish parents. He also writes columns for the AD and presents various programs.
“In my fragments, I show the hard and soft voices that have shaped me,” Akyol said in a reaction. “From my artistic heroes to unknown subcultures: I want to show that, despite differences in origin or class, we are more alike than we think.”
Kuper writes a popular weekly column for the British newspaper Financial Times. The writer lives in Paris but still has a special bond with the Netherlands. “I am very connected to the Netherlands, I still cheer for Oranje,” he says. “But I am not Dutch. I see the country from the outside. From Dutch football to the Dutch elections. I certainly hope to give the viewer that perspective.”
Cabaret artist, singer, and actress Crutzen will be able to compile her favorite television evening on August 10. “I’m really looking forward to it, even though I’m shitting a thousand colors,” she says.
Crutzen is known from programs such as Promenade, Klikbeet, Bodem, and Tropenjaren. She also regularly performs on stage with various performances. “I collect everything I find beautiful, inspiring, painful, and funny. The common denominator is that they are fragments that tell heavy, universal themes, such as grief, loneliness, and falling by the wayside, in a light way.”
Üngör is the fourth guest in the new Zomergasten season. He wants to compile an evening that is aimed at “everyone who is genuinely curious about the large-scale and violent injustice in the world, but never dared to approach it or really face it.”
Üngör is a professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Amsterdam and the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies. He was born in the northeast of Turkey, but because of his father’s communist beliefs, the family moved to the Netherlands shortly after his birth.