Marcus Bakker

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Marcus Bakker (1972)

Marcus Bakker (born June 20, 1923 in Zaandam ; † December 24, 2009 ibid) was a Dutch communist journalist and politician .

biography

Bakker came from a politically active family from the Social Democratic Workers' Party (SDAP) , the predecessor of today's Partij van de Arbeid (PvdA). During the German occupation of the Netherlands in 1943 he joined the communist resistance movement and the Communist Partij van Nederland (CPN).

Immediately after the liberation by the Allied forces, he became a member of the CPN's party executive committee in 1945 and then of its executive committee in 1947. In this function he was one of the leading authors of the CPN's election manifesto in 1951, alongside the party chairman Paul de Groot (1899–1986), whom he admired . In it Josef Stalin was called the “Greatest General of All Time”, which illustrates the strong CPSU- oriented attitude of the party.

In 1953 he was appointed editor-in-chief of the party newspaper De Waarheid and thus the youngest editor-in-chief in the Netherlands. During his activity, which lasted until 1958, the newspaper published a special edition on March 6, 1953 on the death of Stalin. After “De Waarheid” sided with the invaders during the Hungarian uprising , she was expelled from the daily newspaper association NDP Nieuwsmedia . There was a discharge of popular anger against the party and the newspaper when a crowd tried to storm the Felix Meritis party house , which also housed the Waarheid printing works. In other respects, too, the newspaper got out of hand, for example it was the only one that did not bow to the self-censorship of the Dutch newspapers during the Greet Hofmans affair and reported on them.

In 1956 he was elected as a representative of the CPN to the Second Chamber of the States General , the lower house of the Dutch Parliament , and was a member of this until 1982.

From 1963 to 1982, as successor to de Groot, Bakker was not only chairman of the CPN parliamentary group in the Second Chamber, but also the actual political leader of the party alongside party chairman de Groot, and after the break with the CPSU in 1963, he increasingly turned it into a selectable left-wing alternative . In 1972 the CPN won seven parliamentary seats, which made the formation of a Popular Front government conceivable.

However, the election campaign ( Van Agt eruit, de CPN erin ; in German: "Van Agt out, the CPN in") in the 1977 elections against the Katholieke Volkspartij (KVP) under Dries van Agt by the incumbent Prime Minister and Chairman of the PvdA, Joop the Uyl , viewed as so aggressive that it ruled out a coalition with the CPN and thus, despite its position as the largest faction, decided not to form a government. The CPN itself suffered a severe election defeat and in 1977 only won two parliamentary seats. When de Groot then assigned the blame to Bakker and other leading politicians of the CPN such as the new party chairman Henk Hoekstra (1924–2009) and the brothers Jaap and Joop Wolff , the first, but also only, argument between Bakker and de Groot took place.

He saw the collapse of most communist governments worldwide after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 as a deep turning point in the communist worldview, but on the other hand condemned the emerging changes in the ideologies of the communist parties.

After the dissolution of the CPN, he finally became a member of the newly founded GroenLinks party in 1991 .

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Commons : Marcus Bakker  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Bakker, Marcus
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch politician and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH June 20, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Zaandam
DATE OF DEATH December 24, 2009
Place of death Zaandam