Dutch politician, writer, publicist and documentary maker.
She is the intended Mayor of Amsterdam and was the leading politician of the left wing Dutch Green party (GroenLinks) from 2002 to 2010.
Her mother, Olga Halsema-Fles, was a Labor alderman of Enschede and is a member of the Board of Supervision Social Insurance. Her father was a sports teacher and official sports affairs at the municipality of Enschede.
In 1983, Halsema graduated from the Kottenpark-college in Enschede with a Havo-diploma. Between 1984 and 1985 she attended the Vrije Hogeschool (teachers program for Waldorf schools) in Driebergen. In 1985 she started training as a Dutch and history teacher in Utrecht. In 1988 she left her training without graduating. After that she worked for a year in an Utrecht café. She then started studying general social sciences at Utrecht University, specialising in criminology.
After graduating (1993) became a staff member of the Wiardi Beckman Foundation (WBS), the scientific institute of the Labor Party (PvdA), conducting research in the field of social democracy and current social themes.
In 1996 she travelled through the United States as a fellow for the German Marshall Fund. In 1996 she became an editor for the De Helling, the magazine of the research institute of GroenLinks. In the same year, she started combining her work at the WBS with work for De Balie, a political and cultural centre in Amsterdam. For De Balie she led the project Res Publica about the meaning of the Constitution of the Netherlands for the modern society. She also joined the programme committee of the Labour Party for the 1998 election.
Autumn 1997, Halsema left the Labour Party and the WBS. The direct cause was the rigorous way in which the police had handled the protests against the European summit that was working on the Treaty of Amsterdam. The Labor Party mayor Schelto Patijn put 500 people in preventive detention. After leaving the WBS, she continued to work at De Balie and also was a columnist at Het Parool and for IKON radio. She also worked as an editor at the publisher Van Gennep.
A year later, she became Member of Parliament for GroenLinks and in 2002 as successor of Paul Rosenmöller, the political leader. She steered on a liberal left-wing course, but in 2010 did not realize a cabinet participation for her party.
In January 2011, she left politics and became a publicist and documentary maker. Was in 2011-2012 in Tilburg special professor of politics in the 21st century. Although she was known as charming, relativizing and a persistent debater, opponents sometimes found her quite rude.
Femke Halsema lives in Amsterdam with her teenager twins and her partner Robert Oey (27 August 1966, Middelburg), a documentary maker.
Link to Wikipedia