This article lists political parties in the Netherlands. The Netherlands has a multi-party system with numerous political parties, in which any one party has little chance of gaining power alone, and parties often work with each other to form coalition governments.
The lower house of the legislature, the House of Representatives, is elected by a national party-list system of proportional representation. There is no threshold for getting a seat, making it possible for a party to get a seat with only two-thirds percent of the vote—roughly one seat for every 50,000 votes. Since this system was implemented in 1918, no party has even approached the seats needed for an outright majority. However, there is a broad consensus on the basic principles of the political system, and all parties must adjust their goals to some extent in order to have a realistic chance at being part of the government.
Read more about Political Parties In The Netherlands: Defunct Parties
Famous quotes containing the words political, parties and/or netherlands:
“As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choicethere is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community. To discover how scientific revolutions are effected, we shall therefore have to examine not only the impact of nature and of logic, but also the techniques of persuasive argumentation effective within the quite special groups that constitute the community of scientists.”
—Thomas S. Kuhn (b. 1922)
“Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogethery, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (17881824)
“Greece is a sort of American vassal; the Netherlands is the country of American bases that grow like tulip bulbs; Cuba is the main sugar plantation of the American monopolies; Turkey is prepared to kow-tow before any United States pro-consul and Canada is the boring second fiddle in the American symphony.”
—Andrei Andreyevich Gromyko (19091989)