 Femke Halsema attending a demonstration Femke Halsema (Haarlem, April 25, 1966) is a politician in the Netherlands. She has been in parliament since 1998 for the left-wing ecologist party GroenLinks, Green Left. In November 2002 she unexpectedly became party leader, replacing Paul Rosenmöller.
During the first government of Jan Peter Balkenende she strongly criticized the new and very restricive immigration laws.
At the end of 2003, she temporarily had to retreat as party leader because she was pregnant. On November 1 she gave birth to two twins: Suzy and Bruno. During her absence, Marijke Vos replaced her.
After entering the political arena again, in 2004 she started a wide ideological discussion within the party; breaking with the party's socialist roots, she claimed it was in fact 'the last leftist liberal party in the Netherlands.' Further, she stressed cultural and religious tolerance as core values.
Background
Halsema graduated in criminology at the University of Amsterdam. From 1993 to 1997, before she joined GroenLinks, she worked for the Wiardi Beckman Foundation, the think tank of the Dutch Labour Party Partij van de Arbeid, and from 1996 to 1998 at De Balie in Amsterdam, a well-known Dutch political-cultural centre. With this intellectual background she differs from her predecessor Rosenmöller, who left college to work in the Rotterdam Harbor.
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