The Dutch Labour Party and Green Party are forming a historic merger. Why is it happening and what can we learn from it?  Compass Director, Neal Lawson spoke to Ex-Compass employee and Green Party activist in the UK and now the Netherlands, Remco van der Stoep about the merger.

Remco van der Stoep: So they [Dutch Social Democrats, PvdA] still have their power base in some larger urban areas, like Amsterdam, but overall they have far less influence, and their membership is aging a lot, so they could see that the future wasn’t looking too bright. Greens are on a bit of an opposite trajectory, growing numbers of members, getting through in much more diverse array of places locally, but nationally also still struggling to get into a real position of influence. And then you can sort of see that voters are both confused and a little bit daunted by the fact that if you want to vote for a progressive party, you’re always going to vote for a party that’s going to be, at best, a junior party in a coalition with more right-wing parties. And if you look at the dynamics of Dutch elections, where you have fragmented system, lots of parties which will battle for something like 15-20% of the votes and then have 15-20% of the seats, so we’ll have to form a coalition with two or three other parties. Voters tend to flock to the parties that are able to win an election like that and to deliver the Prime Minister, and as two separate parties, we were not in that position in recent years. We were always in the position of hoping that that we might get invited by another party to be part of a government. And a lot of voters just really want an option, a progressive party that was going to be delivering a Prime Minister and that was going to be the leading party in a coalition. So joining forces was the obvious way of getting there and in terms of the content, in terms of what both parties were advocating, it wasn’t a huge leap to bring them together. Yes, there’s minor differences on some policy areas. Yes, there are sometimes considerable differences in terms of the party culture. But we’ve just set off trying to see what happens if you go and doing these things together.

So the first thing that happened was that in the Senate, both parties formed one group rather than two separate groups. And the same happened then in the national Parliament and now in very many local places. In the local elections, we will go towards the electorate as a combined list [in 90% of municipalities] so you can just vote for the GreenLeft-Labour combination rather than for one of each of the parties. This has all been going on for about four years now, this gradual move towards being more and more one party instead of two. Of course, there is resistance within both parties, more so within the Labour Party than within the Green Party. But it’s kind of reassuring because if you look at the people who are the faces of that movement, you can immediately see, well, yes, that’s not the people that you need.

Neal Lawson: Who sparked the initiative? Is there a kind of point at which someone kicked it off?

RvdS: A lot happens behind the scenes. And whether that was politicians or more like party organisers, I don’t really know. Parties have worked together, sort of in coalitions, in many places already, even before this all started. There were pacts around Government coalition negotiations. So when there would be coalition negotiations at national level, Greens and Labour said ‘Either we’re going in together or we’re not joining, we’re not going to let them play us apart’. So I guess that was a way of bringing both parties closer together. And there was this incident where at the European elections in 2019 – they tend to provide these voter assistant tools where you go online and you give your answer to 20 statements and then you it tells you which party is closest – and they couldn’t find a single one that was different between Labour and Greens. So they had to add an extra question, to find something we differed on in European policy, so that was already very telling in terms of these two parties. They don’t need to be two different parties. They can be one and the same.

NL: Will there be an official merger? Will there a single name?

RvdS: We have our party conference, our joint party conference, on the 21st of June – this will be the third time we have it together – and there will be a proposal from both party boards to move towards a single party, a new party with a new name, which was already on the cards but now they’re just advancing it more rapidly because 2030 will be way too late. We were expecting a General Election, and with the whole international situation [wars, autocrats, climate breakdown, etc.] people want to see action, and for these parties stop worrying about themselves so much and have an answer to what’s going on in the outside world. So we just want to get it over with, which means, after the local elections of March 2026, both parties will be absorbed into a new national party, which will have a new name and a new profile.

NL: How exciting! And does it go out for a final ratification by the membership?

RvdS: Of course!

NL: And on the ground, in terms of your local party, you’re working really very closely with your Labour colleagues?

RvdS: Yeah, it’s great fun. Of course, we had to go through this whole process where we had meetings with Greens-only, a meeting with Labour-only, and then mixed meetings. But because I have the Compass experience, I went in there with lots of confidence, like ‘come on guys, this is going to be so easy’. And it was! People just had to get over themselves a little bit. And sometimes some people are still a little bit hesitant about people, but it’s a thing about culture, it’s a thing about identity, it’s not really a thing about the policies that we’re supporting with the world that we want to see, because we’re looking at the same future. And you can see that, actually, when you bring people in a room together, and when you stop being a Green or a Labour person, that you’re sort of part of something bigger, people immediately adapt and interpersonal relationships were very easy to forge, not more difficult at all. As I can remember from the 2017 campaign, it was the like ‘I’m not even sure which party I’m with here’, because it’s just the same.

NL: What – if any – have been barriers and what do you anticipate as being the problems in the future?

RvdS: In the Netherlands it’s sort of unusual for one party to have a majority in any Parliament at any level. There are about seven cities in the Netherlands where a combined GreenLeft-Labour list would have a North Korean-type results, like Amsterdam, Utrecht and Wageningen. That means that if there’s anything bad happening, if there’s a reason why people would be dissatisfied with a progressive party, then they will be immediately dissatisfied with the whole of that big progressive movement and they would flock to sort of marginal parties on the progressive side, which I think – yeah, it runs counter to party interests, but to me, politically, that’s interesting and fine and brings more pluralism to those localities. But you can see if you’re a councillor there and you want to be re-elected, and suddenly you’re no longer able to sort of distinguish yourself from your main opponent which is also a progressive party then, yeah, there’s a bit of a void there which they will struggle with. And also, because they’d be each other’s competitors in those places, it also means that interpersonal relationships are much more difficult to forge or to get over the differences that you have because you’ve been fighting each other for years and years. This I recognised from some places in the UK as well, where we tried to get Labour and LibDem people to work together.

NL: So what do you think is the best that could happen out of this?

RvdS: That this new progressive party will become the biggest party nationally, that we will have a progressive Prime Minister, that we will form a very strong electoral base both locally and nationally, and that we can turn the political direction of this country around into a more progressive direction.

NL: When are the next elections expected?

RvdS: Nobody knows. Just as long as this current coalition lasts. They might just fall over at any moment. They go from crisis to crisis to crisis. Nobody knows when it’s going to be the last crisis and that’s why the Greens and Labour want to get this done quickly.

NL: What else do we need to know about the movement?

RvdS: I think there’s a broad group of people within Labour and Greens who don’t see this as the end result of this effort but want to go much further in terms of bringing together progressives. There are progressive liberals in a party called D66 [Democrats 66, Dutch: Democraten 66], there’s a there’s a party for animal rights [Party for the Animals, Dutch: Partij voor de Dieren]. There are lots of minor progressive forces in Dutch politics, and ideologically, we’re very, very close. So you could see this becoming more of a movement, less of a political party, and for them to gradually become part of that movement. I am one of those who’s in favour of thinking in that way and opening up as much as we can. And it’ll be interesting to see if the resulting new party can achieve that and that will be very much something that our political leaders will need to support for it to succeed.

NL: Does the movement have links into civil society?

RvdS: It’s not a very complicated country when it comes to civil society. Civil society forces aren’t very actively engaged with party politics. So those links are something that could become more of a factor than it is right now.

NL: What I’m calling that here is amongst the Greenpeaces and the Tax Justices and whoever. There’s a level of systems consciousness arising. It’s not just our issue. It’s the economic and democratic system which is stopping us getting what we want. We have to change the economic and democratic system. And I think that must be a universal thing for progressive civil society organizations here but in the Netherlands and everywhere else as well.

RvdS: How do we tap into that and utilize that effectively I think is a big question. They’re still very much so focusing on the symptoms, right? Yeah, you can hear that a lot, and the symptoms are terrible, yeah, especially when it comes to green issues, like nitrogen destroying nature. There’s lots going on there, but everybody’s very focused on the symptoms and less on the systems. Rhetoric is there, but it’s not really making the mainstream yet.

Remco van der Stoep is a consultant and advisor across a wide range of organising spaces, as well as a former Compass employee.