Rinze Visser

Rinze Visser was born in Lemmer, a fishing town in the south west of Friesland, on 18 December 1938. He grew up in a fishing family with two brothers and a sister. His father, a fisherman, was a member of the Communist Party of the Netherlands (CPN), though not a fervent one, and the family read the communist daily De Waarheid.

Visser was a good pupil and went on to the ULO, a secondary school. He started in an office job but found it did not suit him and went to sea. He later earned his living as a street paver and construction worker, and Wikipedia records that before retiring he worked in shipping and fishing. According to Lemsternijs, as a boy of 14 he was struck by how much less people with little schooling were paid than those with more, and fighting that inequality became the thread of his politics.

Visser joined the CPN at the age of 21. In the 1970 municipal elections he was elected to the council of Lemsterland while still working as a fisherman, succeeding the CPN councillor Anne Visser, who was no relation and had by then served for 25 years. Between them, the two men represented communism in Lemmer for more than 80 years.

He rose within the party nationally. He was elected to the CPN executive and in November 1978 was part of an executive delegation to the German Democratic Republic, where it met Erich Honecker and laid a wreath at the memorial to the victims of fascism and militarism in East Berlin. He headed the CPN list in the 1978 Friesland provincial elections, was 17th on the party's list for the first European Parliament elections in 1979, and stood for the Senate in 1980.

From the early 1980s Visser was part of the Horizontaal Overleg van Communisten, an orthodox Marxist Leninist pressure group inside the CPN. He opposed the current in the party that wanted to merge it into a broad progressive movement, the path that later led to GroenLinks.

The group broke away and in 1984 founded the Verbond van Communisten in Nederland (VCN), with Visser on its first board. He was re-elected to the Lemsterland council for the VCN in 1986 and 1990, as the party's only elected representative anywhere. He also stood for the House of Representatives, second on the VCN list in 1986 and as the party leader on the list in 1989.

When the CPN finally ceased to exist in 1991, the VCN and several local communist groups merged into the New Communist Party of the Netherlands (NCPN). Visser continued as its councillor in Lemsterland and led the NCPN list for the House of Representatives in 1994, standing third in 1998 and fifth in 2003.

In 2014 Lemsterland was merged into the new municipality of De Fryske Marren. Thanks to his strong vote in Lemmer, though little support elsewhere, he was re-elected as a one man group. In 2018 the NCPN won a second seat, taken by Sake Barelds, which it lost again in 2022. Visser also wrote a regular column for Manifest, the NCPN's monthly paper.

By September 2025 Visser had been a councillor for 55 years, the longest of anyone serving on a Dutch municipal council, and De Fryske Marren awarded him its medal of honour for the second time, presented by mayor Klaas Agricola. National papers including NRC and Vice wrote about him as the man keeping communism alive in Dutch local politics.

In Lemmer he was known less for ideology than for practical help. Lemsternijs described a man with a big social heart who, almost to the end, put everything he had into helping people who ran up against bureaucracy or felt they had been wronged, and who helped many residents with paperwork they found too complicated. According to the outlet, for him being a communist meant helping others.

Visser had long been in poor health, chiefly because of COPD, which left him short of breath and in constant pain. In November 2025 he announced that he would not stand in the 2026 municipal elections, and he attended his last council meetings around the turn of the year. In January 2026 the NCPN said it would not take part in the election in De Fryske Marren because no suitable successor had been found, ending decades of communist representation in Lemmer.

At the farewell to the outgoing council at the end of March 2026 he was given a special tribute for his 56 years of service.

Visser married Lenie Visser-Wheda in 1964. She was also a member of the NCPN and appeared on the party's local candidate list. He lived in Lemmer all his life.

Lemsternijs reported on the evening of 17 October 2026 that it had received the news that Rinze Visser had died at the age of 87. The exact date and place of death were not published in the first reports. He had long been in poor health, mainly because of COPD, and the English Wikipedia list of deaths gives COPD as the cause. Funeral arrangements had not been reported at the time of writing.

Note on dates: Lemsternijs gave his birth date as 18 December 1939, but Wikipedia, contemporary reports describing him as 87 in early 2026, and his age at death all point to 18 December 1938.

Visser's career is a rare example of continuity in Dutch local politics: one man, one town and one political tradition across more than half a century, through the collapse of the CPN and two municipal reorganisations. His departure in 2026 also marked the end of communist representation in Lemmer, where a Visser had sat for the party for more than 80 years.

In the town he was remembered not only as a political curiosity but as a councillor who answered the door to anyone who needed help with an official letter or a dispute, and who believed, as Lemsternijs put it, that people are in the world to help one another.