JOVD Vice President Dennis van den Oever has given the next speech during the last LYMEC Congress in the Netherlands:

Dear liberal-friends,

Today we are here for the LYMEC spring congress, hosted by JD and JOVD. My name is Dennis van den Oever and I am the Vice President of the JOVD. JOVD is the youth organization of the VVD, the Peoples party for Freedom and Democracy.

First of all I would like to thank LYMEC for the opportunity to organize this congress here in The Netherlands. It is an honor for us to have so much young liberals from all over Europe here in Utrecht.

In june last year, parliamentary elections were held in The Netherlands. The VVD won the elections and became, for the first time in history, the biggest party. And that made our party-leader Mark Rutte the first liberal Prime Minister since 1918. Since last October we have a new government, with the VVD as biggest party in the coalition. As JOVD we are very proud that our Mother party, booked such a great succes. At the same time that gives us, as youth organization, the responsibility to safeguard the liberal principles. But in the end we both have the same goal: making The Netherlands an even more liberal country.

The biggest challenge our government has in next few years is to lower the state debt. They have to cut 18 billion euro’s on the national budget. This is highly necessary to make sure that the debts will not increase sky-high, and divide the debts fairly between the old and the young generation.

During this congress we will talk about pensions. The Dutch government just proposed to raise the retirement age from 65 to 66. But to make our pension system financially stable, it is only a small first step. The second step is to raise the retirement age to 67. And in the end we have to reform our pension system to a system where you save for your own retirement. That makes people responsible for their own future, by giving them the choice for a private option.

The system of today is a system with one pension fund for every branch, without the option to switch to another pension fund. This system was build in the society of the past, a society where people work their whole live for one employer. Nowadays people switch from job to job many times in their working life. That means that you also have to switch many times from pension fund, with negative financial consequences. We want people to have the possibility to choose in which pension fund they want to participate.

This government makes the first step and we hope for more. Because otherwise coming generations will have to pay for today’s neglect.

I hope that I inspired you for this weekend and I wish you a lot fun and a good congress here in the Netherlands.