No Shame Hollander: The New Dutch PM and the Queer Politics of Heated Rivalry
It is 2026. As I scroll through Instagram, I am dutifully informed that in the Netherlands, I will have to work until at least 70 to qualify for a pension. I also discover, in the same stupid carousel, that the new so-called center-left coalition wants to cut disability benefits for the most vulnerable, slash maternity leave rights for mothers, and walk back on the promises they made about collaborating with the state of Israel. This coalition is led by the now internet-famous heartthrob, Dutch politician Rob Jetten.
Ironically, in the same doomscroll, I came across a post from one of the many gay news pages I follow. The headline:
“Real-life Heated Rivalry? Learn the story of the adorable new gay Dutch prime minister and his once hidden field hockey boyfriend.”
If you hadn’t seen it already, since early January 2026, this connection between the new Dutch prime minister and Heated Rivalry has been mushrooming across every kind of news platform and corner of social media. Rob Jetten and his fiancé, Argentinian field hockey player Nico Keenan, had already described their relationship to the public in terms that would later echo those present in the Game Changers (Rachel Reid) book series and the Heated Rivalry (Jacob Tierney) television show. Relationships that begin secrecy, drowned in gay yearning and heart-crushing longing, and often centered on the difficulty of being openly queer in certain professional environments. And perhaps, most importantly, the presence of a true happy ending.
Nico has said that, early on, he kept Rob out of public view and away from his games, partly because Rob’s political career was taking off. They only later made their relationship public. Then, Rob’s party, D66, won the October 2025 election with its (depending on who you ask) center platform, finished coalition talks in January 2026, and Rob was formally appointed prime minister the following month. All of these factors coincided and formed a perfect storm for popular clickbait: a mix of breaking news, viral pop culture, and, to those familiar, classic MLM (men-loving-men) romance tropes. Unlike in Heated Rivalry, however, Rob and Nico’s story has a distinctly cultural twist: in the most glamorously Dutch fashion, they first locked eyes at an Albert Heijn in The Hague, rather than a smoothie shop in New York City.
The comments on the post are a typical combination of wholesome and painfully thirsty. They paint a picture of Rob Jetten as a young, game-changing progressive that I have yet to see myself. This reflects something familiar to many of us in contemporary Western politics: the base assumption that Rob, as a gay man, must be spearheading leftist policies by nature of his identity. One comment, probably from a well-meaning American who believes all of Europe has socialized medicine, reads “yay to free healthcare!”. Healthcare is not free in the Netherlands, and is actually getting more expensive for everyone under his coalition. Another celebrates free university, also not free in the Netherlands, and probably getting more expensive for everyone under his coalition.
As I scroll through, the few people actually asking about his policies are answered in detail by what seem to be Dutch leftists, begging and pleading commenters to at least go on Wikipedia before knee-jerk glorifying this man and his party. Some comments are defensive in return, defensively guarding whatever scraps of queer joy they can find in our hostile landscape in the name of representation. Others, once corrected, soften: “thanks for letting me know, that’s a shame” or “damn, I thought we won. It’s always something.” And that’s true. It is always something.
What are the mechanics behind these misinterpretations? Are these assumptions of progressiveness organic, or are they somehow orchestrated? Whatever the case, Rob and Nico are no strangers to how fans are interpreting their connection to the show. They even explicitly acknowledge it themselves. A few months ago, Nico uploaded photos of himself reacting to Heated Rivalry episodes on Instagram. They were quite touching:
“Secret love behind four walls…been there done that. Not letting Rob come to my games. Not letting him be a part of my socials. Passing him on the street and acting like he was a stranger. Watching it now on the show…yeah, not proud of it.”
It is unclear whether the lovestruck media frenzy began after Nico made his own connection to the show—most major publications only covered the story after he made these remarks—or whether it had already been brewing among perceptive fans, who were aware of Rob’s trajectory as a young gay politician and had begun making the connection in Heated Rivalry fan spaces. Rob Jetten, after all, is no stranger to the internet’s parasocial fascination with his romantic relationships. For years, he had already been circulating in fanfiction and MLM fan spaces under the ship name “Reese,” thanks to a fictional pairing fans created between him and another Dutch politician, Jesse Klaver. The two politicians even acknowledged the ship publicly, posting videos together that riffed on the idea.
My personal morning-after-the-election-moment was defined by checking Rob Jetten’s Instagram hashtag out of curiosity and laughing when I saw it flooded with Reese yaoi memes rather than actual political content—which, in all fairness, is not the worst possible introduction to the Tweede Kamer. In the most full circle internet fashion, Nico recently remarked that he had become aware of Rob not only through his career as a politician, but through these same yaoi memes (1).
In any case, the headlines were clear: this was a historic moment. Jetten is not only the first openly queer prime minister, but also the youngest—and how much cooler can you be right now than being tangentially related to Heated Rivalry? A triumphant story about his romance and hot athlete fiancé is far more entertaining and joyful than a detailed overview of his party’s policies, failures, and achievements. Such an approach would ironically be treating him more seriously as a politician rather than reducing him to his identity and private romantic life. However, Heated Rivalry is everywhere you look, even in Dutch elections.
And because we, authors of this article, haven’t said it clearly yet, we love the show. We’ve watched it numerous times and cried our eyes out at the amount of queer love and joy on screen. We recognize how incredible it is that the show's impact has reached current and former athletes who are vocal about how much work still needs to be done within the traditionally masculine environments of men’s sports. It matters to us—no matter how much shit we will talk about centrist politicians in this article—that in the Netherlands we can have gay politicians and that we can also criticize them. It is not something we intend to take for granted.
So what can we make of this connection between Heated Rivalry and the real-life athlete-politician couple? Now, a few months in, it seems like the couple is now fully embracing the fans’ ingenious connection between their story and Heated Rivalry. In a recent TikTok upload from Nico, he and Rob are reading out dialogue from the book that inspired the series while staring in each other's eyes. It’s hot, and it works. Everybody is freaking out in the comments. They are all grateful for this representation. They are all obsessed with the potential of a real-life Ilya and Shane. They wonder why they can’t have politicians like this in their countries. The joy is contagious despite its unspoken superficiality.
Which brings us to the central question of this article: Is it okay to appreciate gay representation without gay politics?
Because when you truly think about it, our beloved show discusses nothing but queerness. Male queerness, its intersection with hypermasculinity, a dash of coming out to supportive parents and, slightly, ever so slightly, the threat posed by national politics to gay people. Ilya Rozanov’s Russian background harshly contrasts the accepting Canadian environment Shane is used to. It’s bold and scary, a foreign shadow looming over his life, at times vaguely threatening his survival. It is, unfortunately, a reality for many queer Russians or Eastern Europeans overall, but it is also a distraction pulling viewers away from the complicated and oftentimes cruel history of Russia as a nation. Ilya’s rightful disdain for his own country makes for a clean break between him as a queer person and the questionable morality of Russian politics, which are never discussed outside of gay rights. The exploration of Russian identity stops there.
After all, Heated Rivalry is a show about being gay—both the good parts (cottages) and the bad ones (homophobia in sports)—not about the Russian occupation of Ukraine, legal rights of queer people, or class inequality. And it is deeply appreciated by its viewers (including us) for being just that—a queer story with a happy ending and enough ups and downs to keep tugging at our heartstrings. It doesn’t need to be more because its queer mission speaks loudly to thousands of people, and its positive impact cannot be easily measured. Gay love deserves to have the spotlight on it, unrestrained by the many downsides of its sometimes cruel reality. In fiction, this focus works. Heated Rivalry was created as a romance: the core purpose of the genre is to titillate and warmly envelop readers with the haze of gay love. But when we try to apply genre conventions over the intensely complex political landscape of real life, other issues and identities may very well be erased.
Maybe most of us do want Rob Jetten and his partner Nico to be the real-life Ilya and Shane, all happy and famous in their love, ready to be ogled and adored. Only one teeny, tiny thing stands in the way of that enjoyment: Rob Jetten is a public servant of the highest rank, and his decisions and values have an immense impact on an entire country full of almost every type of person imaginable. Fandom makes everything more fun, except for maybe the real-life erosion of people’s funding and rights. It may seem overtly negative to respond to every excited non-Dutch person that their newfound gay icon is not exactly the progressive they project him to be. In an ironic twist of fate, gay people can choose to be removed from the web of social issues within which queerness exists, and enjoy it with little intentionality towards collective liberation. Much like Heated Rivalry, you too can only think about the world through an exclusively gay lens.
There is something significant to be said here about queer identity: being gay does not make one a good person. The struggles of queerness can’t overshadow any negative action somebody makes, and they are not always more important than the consequences of their decisions. Rob Jetten is unintentionally profiting off of two things: a tendency to assume that queerness = good (therefore queer person = good), and an optimistic attitude of the social progress his ascension to being Prime Minister of the Netherlands represents. Although the first tendency is easier to recognise and criticize as a quite basic logical fallacy, the second one is harder to dispel, and understandably so.
Can we call this pinkwashing, even though there is no clear strategy behind what is happening among fans online? Pinkwashing is a term coined by Palestinian activists to describe how Israel uses sympathetic messaging toward LGBTQ+ groups as a kind of propaganda blanket, invoking affinity with queer culture to deflect from its decades of mistreatment of Palestinians. Clearly, this case is far less serious and far less institutionalized. The term has since evolved colloquially to describe situations in which companies, organizations, or governments use queer representation and aesthetics to appeal to liberal audiences, while lacking policies that meaningfully improve queer people’s lives. It is therefore still worth exploring how a dynamic like this can take shape without any master plan behind it. Because what unknowing fans are actually doing when they repost news about Rob and Nico into Heated Rivalry fan spaces is participating in the spread of political propaganda, however banal it may be.
The problem with calling it pinkwashing is that the truth sounds far less insidious. Rob and Nico probably just happen to like the show—I would wager that there is no grand strategy to harness its spontaneous fame to this coalition’s advantage (the Dutch are too nuchter for that). What we are instead seeing is a kind of accidental or bottom-up pinkwashing, where well-meaning fans project the emotional logic of Heated Rivalry onto a real political figure and, by extension, the coalition he represents. They defend him because of a proud parasocial connection they’ve made with him, with his heart-tingling story of successful gay love, all supercharged by the contagious, highly charged intimacy of the show.
On every single subreddit or fan forum of Heated Rivalry, you will now see photos of Rob and Nico. You will see the story of their love, and Rob’s later ascent into politics, framed as something aspirational. This is how the softness, intimacy, and perceived progressiveness of queer love from the show become attached not just to Rob Jetten as a person, but to his politics. In this translation, policies that materially affect people’s lives are flattened into a feel-good narrative about representation.
In reality, Rob Jetten is a centrist. This article is not intended to serve as a comprehensive resource on his politics, but for our readers: in our opinion, he is progressive in some ways—such as on climate policy (so long as it doesn’t come at the expense of the economy), maybe the housing crisis, and, of course, queer representation. In other areas, however, he is the opposite of that: increasing the defense budget at the expense of sectors like healthcare, and further restricting social benefits in line with the previous far-right cabinet’s policies. He is not the worst (thank god), but economic analysts studying his coalition plans warn that they will undeniably make life harder for the poorest people (2).
Despite the fact that this information is accessible, critique of Jetten becomes harder because it feels like spoiling something joyful (you can already hear the “let people enjoy things!”). We also don’t believe people are being malicious in their fangirling and celebration. If anything, it comes from a very understandable desire to see queerness reflected in positions of power, and to believe that this visibility signals a better world. Who are we to tell queer people from repressive countries that they shouldn’t celebrate this as a win? And yet, it is unfortunately true that queerness and fandom become the very things that soften or obscure the impact of Jetten’s decisions, which, in our opinion, have little to do with collective liberation.
So yes, queer people can be happy that the current Dutch prime minister is the first openly gay one, and also the youngest ever. Not that anybody needs our permission to celebrate, but we will give it anyway. There is plenty of comfort to be found in the fact that someone generally rejected or at most tolerated by society was able to either overcome this condition or use it to their advantage. In a sense, Rob Jetten becoming prime minister is roughly equivalent to Ilya and Shane getting to be happily together: a queer story with a positive ending, something every gay person has been wanting since… forever. And especially if you are unfamiliar with Dutch history, culture, and politics, the celebratory potential is definitely there.
However, I think what this phenomenon has made us realize, as writers of this article, is that the internet has made us increasingly accustomed to engaging with politics through the aesthetics of personality and fandom—and this is just another form of that. In the internet age, online political communities are formed through many of the same communication mechanics as fandoms, and every side of the political spectrum has its beautiful idols that it wants to see win regardless of nuance. Even New York City mayor and darling Zohran Mamdani has probably amassed as many online fans in other countries as he has actual voters in New York, and he too told his people to go read Heated Rivalry! The issue is that fandom encourages emotional attachment, projection, and forgiveness. Politics requires considerable distance, critique, and accountability. It could simply be that these two realities are fundamentally incompatible. Progress in visibility doesn’t guarantee progress in the quality of people’s lives, and that is difficult to sit with, especially for queer people who desperately want to see themselves safely out in the public eye.
At the end of the day, Heated Rivalry and its (sometimes rabid) fans exist in a completely different thematic realm than governmental policy and political progress. They’re not completely divorced from each other, yet they also shouldn’t be married by nature of the genre. The swallowing of real-life politicians into romance fandoms may always result in a bit of nausea. So when we’re asking ourselves if we can appreciate gay representation without gay politics, maybe the better question is, what are we willing to ignore in order to enjoy it? And which people, exactly, will pay the price for that dissonance?
Ferrer, Isabel. 2026. “Rob Jetten and Nicholas Keenan, The Love Story of the Prime Minister and the Hockey Player That Has Captivated a Country.” EL PAÍS English. February 25, 2026. https://english.elpais.com/lifestyle/2026-02-25/rob-jetten-and-nicholas-keenan-the-love-story-of-the-prime-minister-and-the-hockey-player-that-has-captivated-a-country.html.
Slomp, Priscilla, and Sanne Oving. 2026. “Iedereen Gaat Erop Achteruit Door Coalitieplannen, Vooral Lagere Inkomens.” NU.Nl. February 20, 2026. https://www.nu.nl/formatie/6386787/iedereen-gaat-erop-achteruit-door-coalitieplannen-vooral-lagere-inkomens.html?referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F.