Dual Dutch and Spanish national Raquel García Hermida-van der Walle is number two on the D66 list for the June 6 European parliamentary elections. The EU, she tells Dutch News, offers “amazing freedom”. The European Union has shaped the life of Raquel García Hermida-van der Walle.
She was two years old when Spain signed the Treaty of Accession to join the EU in 1986, in her native city of Madrid. Less than 30 years later she moved to Gorredijk, a town of 7,000 people in Friesland, to live with a Dutchman she met in Barcelona. “It’s something we take for granted, but compare it to what you have to do to move outside the European Union in terms of paperwork, visas and permits,” she says.
“What an amazing freedom it is to be able to decide: ‘I’ve fallen in love with someone, I want to live and study there’, and you can just pack up your bags and go.” She describes herself as “Spanish by birth, Dutch by choice and European by conviction.” It made her a logical choice to stand for the liberal D66 party in next month’s European parliament elections.
When she first came to the Netherlands in 2012 it was to study political science in Utrecht, under the Erasmus scheme. She learned about the Dutch constitutional system, the “poldermodel” of consensus-based policy making and “tolerance policies”. And she followed the election campaign of 2012, where she saw D66 as the party that represented “a firm stand against populism” and “belief in the pr.
