Charlotte van Jonkervelde

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[b]Drs. Charlotte "Charlie" van Jonkervelde[/b] is a Knootian politician and diplomat. Since 2020 she is in office as the Prime Minister of Knootoss, leading a coalition of her own Social-Liberal Party, the centre-right Conservative Party and the Catholic People's Party.

[b][size=150]Biography[/size][/b]

[b]Early Years[/b]
Charlotte van Jonkervelde was born in 1965 in the city of Chamaven. Her father was a judge at a provincial Court of Appeal and her mother was a homemaker. Her father' lineage includes Provincial Pensionaries, Members of the Estates General, East India Company Shareholders and rural landholders in the old Republic. Her mother hails from an upper-middle class family of no great distinction. 

The family were members of the Reformed Church of the Knootian Covenant, and Charlotte was enrolled into the church and baptised at age 12, in line with the credobaptist beliefs of the former State Church. 

She did well in school and would eventually attend the Free University of Leemtrecht, obtaining a double Masters’ Degree in Public Administration and Political Science in 1993. During her student years she joined the Young Social Liberals, serving on the national board as Secretary and overseeing the creation of the youth movements' website, as well as campaigning for the then SLP-led government. Her political activism would continue, on and off, throughout her early life. 

After graduation, she leveraged her law degree and political connections into a position as a consultant at [i]Popular Solutions BV[/i], a small prestigious firm that was called in regularly to advise the government on issues related to administrative, welfare and educational reform. She is said to have shown conscientiousness, political sensitivity and a strong work ethic during these years and was promoted to Junior Partner shortly before the outbreak of war.

During the brief but violent GDODAD invasion of Knootoss she was evacuated to Chamaven from the SLP party offices in Haag, where she had been attending a meeting to discuss the controversial outcome of the election with other party activists. In the political aftermath of the war, she became one of many outspoken proponents of strengthening Knootoss' military to 'defend its values at home and abroad', as well as strengthening its traditional alliances with the now-defunct South Atlantic Treaty Organisation. This activism brought her in touch with some of the more senior party activists engaging with diplomatic and strategic issues. 

She would eventually move from consultancy to ‘change management’ in government, taking up temporary senior management positions at several agencies and large public educational institutions. During this time she became known as an expert on – and proponent of – the gradual privatisation of certain government programmes and the expansion of Public-Private Partnerships. 

When her native city of Chamaven teetered on the edge of bankruptcy, she stepped in and worked as an Alderman with a portfolio that included management of the city budget, bringing down overhead, digitising many government services and safeguarding politically vital cultural, social and educational programmes that had been slated for downsizing. This made her celebrated in administrative circles, but many people ended up losing their jobs, and the SLP was set to lose there at the coming local elections. 

[b]Diplomat and Foreign Minister[/b]
Faced with the prospect of losing the alderman position after the local elections, Charlotte van Jonkervelde was approached by Grand Pensionary Jan Willem Daatman with an offer to "come work for him".  She joined the personal staff of the Grand Pensionary as a senior consultant, and the two are said to have become friends. This friendship would eventually lead to a lateral move from administration into the world of international diplomacy, as Daatman needed someone he knew and trusted in critical postings. In 2015, Daatman appointed her to the position of Ambassador-Observer to the International Freedom Coalition (IFC) and later on to the International Economics and Trade Discussion Centre and Assembly (IFTZ), in which Knootoss was an observer. She was also one of three female Knootian representatives to the International Conference on Crimes Against Women.

She was nominated by her party to become Minister of Foreign Affairs in 2016, after the Purendal Incident and the political crisis that followed. She would hold this position until the election of 2020. As a minister she focused more on internal administration than on foreign policy. She oversaw the ongoing separation of that ministry from the Ministry of Defence and waged a battle on behalf of her new turf, clawing back powers related to foreign relations, trade and intelligence gathering that had been taken over by the Ministry of Economic Affairs' Foreign Trade division. In this she was very successful, managing to establish her ministerial position as one of the most important in the cabinet.

Of her foreign policy, it can best be said that she did not rock the boat. In the wake of the Purendal Incident, Knootoss was notably inwards-looking, and Knootians had no appetite for foreign adventures. Her only notable foreign policy accomplishment during her stint as foreign minister was her role in the Zamimbia conference in 2018, which saw the end of Apartheid in South Epheron and a re-partition of the subcontinent. Knootian military advisers were deployed afterwards to maintain the peace and oversee the migration of people-groups to reflect the new borders, securing the survival of a majority-white but democratic state in areas of the continent. 

Her public support for the 'Viljoen Plan' shored up her credibility with right wing Knootians, who look upon the South Epheronian whites as a kindred people with a shared language, but damaged her reputation with much of the left, which considers her actions to be evidence of white supremacy.

[b]2020 Political Campaign[/b]
As a foreign minister with a relatively low political profile, van Jonkervelde was a dark horse to become the SLP candidate for the Prime Ministership. Maurits Viljoen intended to continue in office. It is unclear how much of a role she played in the SLP’s internal struggle to dislodge Viljoen, who was unpopular with the parliamentary party and had an ongoing feud with its leader, Cécile Prisse d'Yvoy. Van Jonkervelde did however end up as the beneficiary of the struggle, owing to her friendship with Jan Willem Daatman and perceived membership of the ‘Daatman Faction’. Though she had no great personal popularity of her own, she did at least lack the negatives of d'Yvoy, whom it was believed would lose a contest of popularity with the likely right-wing challengers. Van Jonkervelde by contrast was seen as competent (in contrast to Viljoen) and inoffensive to centrist voters. 

During the campaign, van Jonkervelde’s 'Ready to Lead' slogan panned, and she was generally seen as cold and reserved in the larger ‘group debates’, where the socialist, green, nationalist and Quarantist candidates were much more prominent, though they ultimately split the progressive vote amongst themselves. 

The key campaign promises made by Van Jonkervelde were to restore national unity in the wake of the rifts that were created by the Purendal Incident, to clean up the Purendal Zone and make it fit for human habitation, and to become serious about fighting climate change. During the campaign she was challenged to take a stand on the legal status of the people living in the quarantined area, but she managed to evade giving a strong answer. She repeatedly had to stress her support for protecting laïcité, as she was still known to belong to her Calvinist Reformed denomination. This made her relatively unpopular with party activists, who preferred to come out to support their local SLP candidates. It was noted that many yard signs and posters were put up in support of local MPs and the SLP more generally, rather than its candidate for Prime Minister.

Knootians elect their Prime Minister in a two-round system. In the first round, Charlotte van Jonkervelde secured only just over 25% of the vote, which trailed even the support for her own party. By contrast, the SLP secured 115 seats (26%) in the countries’ unicameral parliament during the legislative election that was held in conjunction with the first round of voting for Prime Minister. Her leading opponent was the Conservative candidate, billionaire businessman Joris Bosch, the son of the founder of Bosch Industries NV, who obtained a vote share of 38%. He had a forceful platform, promising to abolish corporate taxes and lower income taxes, to modernise the military and to evict the Purendal “Squatters”, using force if necessary. 

Though personally unpopular, coming in second in the election allowed Van Jonkervelde to proceed to the second round of voting. During this round, the left rallied behind her to prevent the election of Bosch, whom an aggressive SLP media blitz hinted might start a civil war. She was ultimately elected with 58% of the vote, with many of her votes coming from Knootian citizens living in the quarantined zone. 

[b]Prime Minister[/b]
After her election, Van Jonkervelde negotiated a coalition accord with the Conservative Party of her erstwhile opponent, as well as the centrist Catholic Peoples’ Party. Coalition negotiations were unusually difficult, but there were few alternative coalitions available, though van Jonkervelde is said to have leveraged the threat of cobbling together a minority government with the greens, supported by socialists and ‘Quarantinist’ MPs, to keep the conservatives out of power. 

The resulting coalition agreement is one that makes no major decisions about the quarantine zone, beyond a generally agreed upon need to make sure that the Purendal Incident can never be repeated, and that large-scale efforts must be made to make the country safer and more liveable. The Purendal inhabitants will in turn be neither recognised nor expelled forcefully from their habitations and places of business. 
 
[b][size=150]Personal Life[/size][/b]
Charlotte van Jonkervelde was 57 years old in 2022 and is married to Peter-Jan van der Hoek, a political consultant whom she met whilst overseeing the establishment of a new Public-Private partnership. 

They have two children, both of whom are in their early twenties: Anne van der Hoek (1999) and Johannes van der Hoek (2002). Neither of her children have been confirmed through baptism in their mothers’ faith and not much else is known about them, though they are thought to be studying abroad.

During the 2020 campaign she claimed her hobbies include cooking, walking in nature and visiting museums, though she was criticised for not having been observed to do any of these things in the last six years, or indeed to have done much at all in public that was not ultimately work-related. Her bumbling appearance on a cooking show during the campaign was described with the hashtag #cringe on social media, as she was observed to wash her hands seven times and leave much of the actual work to the presenters. 

She speaks Dutch, French and English fluently. She goes by the nickname 'Charlie' among friends, and the name has been used in SLP campaign material, though she does not refer in public to herself as such.