Face of Flanders: Martine Tanghe

Martine Tanghe has become the most respected face on Flemish television, as anchor of VRT’s evening news and presenter of such programmes as Sunday’s election round-up. Her former colleague Siegfried Bracke, who stood for N-VA, had plenty of gravitas but was never regarded with affection; her co-presenter Ivan De Vadder is all policy and no personality.

By common consent, Tanghe brings to the job professionalism, unflappability, an openness that inspires the viewer’s trust and one of the most impeccable speaking voices in the public sphere. She also knows when to crack a joke: In the run-up to last weekend’s elections, she asked Bruno Tobback about his party’s youth wing and their vote to legalise cannabis. “What did you think then – shit?”, she said, referring both to the popular term for cannabis in Flanders and most politicians' opinions on the matter. “I see you’re an expert,” Tobback replied to her pun.

Tanghe was born in Aalter, East Flanders, in 1955 and studied languages at Leuven, with the intention of becoming a schoolteacher. After a time teaching Dutch in Latin America, she entered the Flemish public broadcasting service, now known as VRT, in 1977. Apart from a brief break in the 1990s when she worked as a spokesperson for the Flemish Parliament, she’s been there ever since.

Aside from being the news anchor, she also presented the discussion programme Volt, and since 2005 has deployed her blue-chip diction in the reading of the text of the annual Grote Dictee der Nederlandse Taal – where participants have to take down a fiendishly difficult dictation with as few mistakes as possible.

In 2011, her newsroom colleague Freek Braeckman became the only well-known personality ever to win the Dictee. However, Tanghe was not present that year. One month before, she had taken sick leave after being diagnosed with breast cancer. During her absence, her place at the newsdesk was taken over by Phara De Aguirre, another breast cancer survivor.

Like De Aguirre, Tanghe returned to the screen. And Like De Aguirre, she reappeared for an election show and was awarded the Flemish Television Star award as best presenter of the year, in 2013. On Sunday during the election returns, a poster appeared on Facebook with images of Tanghe at her news post through the years. It was titled “The mother of all elections”.

Photo by Bmuss/VRT