Lodewijk Asscher

Origins and early life

Lodewijk Asscher was born in Amsterdam on 27 September 1974, and his Jewish descent runs through his father Bram Asscher, a jurist, whose family is the Amsterdam Jewish house of diamond cutters and lawyers; his great-grandfather was Abraham Asscher, co-chairman of the Jewish Council under the German occupation and, with his brother Joseph, head of the firm that cut the Cullinan diamond in 1908.

Work and career

His mother, Irene Asscher-Vonk, a Catholic, was professor of labour law at Radboud University. Asscher is not religiously observant, and this fiche says so plainly; he has described his Jewish identity as a private part of himself that he nevertheless states publicly in Dutch debates about antisemitism, because of the historical weight the Asscher name carries. He read law at Amsterdam, took a doctorate on media regulation, and entered the city council; from 2006 to 2012 he was alderman and then deputy mayor of Amsterdam, responsible for education, housing and finance, and known for a hard line against exploitation of eastern European labour and against criminal infiltration of the red-light district.

In November 2012 he became deputy prime minister and minister of social affairs and employment in the second Rutte cabinet, where he negotiated the Work and Security Act of 2015 that rewrote Dutch dismissal law and the position of flexible workers, extended parental leave, and launched a national action plan against discrimination and antisemitism. He led the Labour Party from 2016 and again from 2020, and resigned in January 2021 accepting political responsibility for the childcare-benefits scandal in which the tax authorities had wrongly accused thousands of families of fraud, a decision that ended his national career and that this fiche records plainly.