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Moroccan Chairman Elected for Dutch Parliament | ASHARQ AL-AWSAT English Archive 2005 -2017
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Moroccan Chairman Elected for Dutch Parliament


Moroccan Chairman Elected for Dutch Parliament

Moroccan Chairman Elected for Dutch Parliament

After four rounds of voting, Moroccan-Dutch Khadija Arib of the Labor Party came out as the winner with 83 of the 134 valid votes and became new chairwoman of the House of Representatives.

Her appointment followed the resignation of Anouchka van Miltenburg, who stepped down in December over the Teeven drug dealer agreement.

The Moroccan-Dutch, 55, who has been a member of parliament since 1998, will head the House of Representatives until March next year, when parliamentary elections are scheduled to take place.

However, she is not the first Moroccan national to achieve a respectable political position in the Netherlands as Ahmed Aboutaleb has been the Mayor of Rotterdam since 2009.

The Freedom Party Leader, Geert Wilders, described Arib’s election as a ‘black day in history’. The party opposes her appointment because she is a dual Dutch-Moroccan national. He added: “This is the first time a woman with foreign origins occupies this position”.

Khadija Arib came to the Netherlands when she was 15 years old. She is a member of the Dutch Labor Party. Before her political career, she was a civil servant, educator and social worker.As a Member of Parliament, she focused on matters of racism, discrimination control, women abuse, domestic violence and youth care.

It may be noted that, as per the Government statistics, in the population of 17 million people, Holland has 3.80 lakh Morocco origin Arabs.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte congratulated Khadija Arib for winning and said that he is looking forward to work with her.