Ruben Brekelmans

Biography

“Acknowledge your dilemmas”

Helping others improve their situation with new insights and skills has been a common thread in my career. After the credit crunch, I helped companies and authorities get back on their feet. The corona crisis has left us in a similar position, and we need to help people get back up again.

Combining economics and politics

I studied economics and I am particularly interested in how economic crises arise and how they can best be prevented. I wanted to understand the underlying processes and realised that, fundamentally, the decisions are made by politicians, even in the midst of a crisis. For me, combining economics and politics simply made sense.

Political leadership

I’ve been a VVD member for a long time – I was even in the youth wing – and I have served on several VVD committees dealing with international affairs over the years. A few years after graduating in the Netherlands, I went to study at Harvard. Political leadership was a big theme there, and I taught the lessons I learned there to other VVD members in various courses and programmes. I trained my fellow politicians to debate, present, negotiate, and taught them about liberalism.

Now, I get to put all those skills into practice as an MP. Whenever coming across a problem, I think you have to listen carefully first to identify what is wrong, before mapping out the dilemmas you will face in trying to solve the problem. During my studies and early career, I learned to think in dilemmas and realised the importance of acknowledging them when making a decision.