Tag Archives: D66

Mathew Hulbert

Mathew on Monday

By Mathew Hulbert | Mon 23rd February 2026 - 5:00 pm

Hope from The Hague: What Rob Jetten’s victory means for liberals everywhere

Today, in the Netherlands, something quietly historic has happened.

Rob Jetten, leader of Democrats 66, has become Prime Minister. The youngest ever (at 38) and the first openly gay person to hold the office.

Pause on that.

In a European political landscape where we are so often told that the future belongs to the angry, the polarising and the populist, the Dutch electorate has chosen something else. They have chosen the broad, confident Centre.

They have chosen liberalism.

For we Liberal Democrats, there is real encouraging here. Yes it’s a different country with …

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Larry Ngan

Mutual Benefit for learning from each other: My thoughts on the success of our sister parties, and the Liberal International Executive Committee 2025

By Larry Ngan | Tue 25th November 2025 - 11:00 am

You know, the Dutch, they are so liberal, they’ve got two liberal parties… And one of them, the one that’s most like us, D66, were the smaller party in a coalition, and then in 2006 they got stuffed. 2%, 3 MPs, they came ninth.… But you know what, just scroll forward to last year at the European elections. Ninth? No. First. First. … There’s a model we can copy. Survival and revival is in our grasp. Have hope. Have belief.

– Speech by Tim Farron, our former leader, on 2015.

Fast forward to 29th October 2025, D66 became the largest party in the Dutch parliament for the first time, with the vote share of 16.9%. No political pundit predicted this happening when the election was called. According to most opinion polls, they were only on 5-6%. D66 was not even invited to the TV debate between the major parties.

Meanwhile, VVD suffered from a setback at the early stage of the election campaign after a mishap of their party leader Dilan Yeşilgöz MP. However they recovered very quickly and retained 22 seats (A loss of only 2), which is quite an achievement considering they had been in the last government with the populist PVV.

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Jonathan Windsor

Nice guys finish first in Dutch election 

By Jonathan Windsor | Thu 6th November 2025 - 5:11 pm

‘Het kan wel’, a play on Barack Obama’s ‘Yes, we can’ quip, was ringing out in the Netherlands as Rob Jetten and his liberal D66 party surprised the pundits by winning the Dutch General Election last week. It was a close-run thing though, and it was only after all the postal votes had been counted that he was declared victorious against Geert Wilders’ nationalist PVV party, by a historically small margin of 28,000 votes. D66 will now be able to look to form a coalition government after increasing their seats from 9 in 2023 to 26 seats. 

Jetten’s style in this election was positive and energetic. It was clear that he was playing straight from the Obama and Trudeau copybook, and it cut through against the doom and gloom politics of the parties on the right and left. Jetten tapped into the question of ‘who’s flag’, by declaring himself a positive patriot and being photographed in the red, white and blue of the Dutch flag. He also made a good account of himself, and his party, in the media and even appeared on a popular TV quiz show, that seemed to work wonders for his personal credentials.  

Despite being only 38 years old, Jetten has been in Dutch politics for several years now and looks likely to be the youngest Dutch Prime Minister in Dutch history. He will also be the first openly gay Prime Minister. There is still a lot of negotiations to be had to form a coalition, but it looks like he could make the numbers work with the centre-ground parties of the Labour/Green Left, the Christian Democrats, or the VVD. With 76 seats needed for a majority, they may wish to bring in all these parties into the coalition to boost their numbers (to 86) in the House of Representatives.  

While it was a great night for liberals in the Netherlands, it was terrible for the PVV. Geert Wilders, a peroxide haired veteran, was seen as the pantomime villain having been the man who broke the last coalition leading to this snap election. His party lost 11 seats, and more importantly, lost the status of ‘man of the people’. Other hard right parties did make gains, and it’s not clear now whether he will continue as their leader, or whether there will be a realignment on the right of Dutch politics.  

As for the other liberal party in the Netherlands, the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, the VVD, they had a bizarre night. Despite losing two seats and dropping to their lowest share of the vote since the 1970s, there were scenes of jubilation as, up until a fortnight ago, it looked like it would have been a truly terrible night for the once dominant party of Mark Rutte. They were rescued by leader, Dilan Yesilgoz’s, strong performances in the final few televised debates. There will be an element of soul-searching for their members, but it looks likely that they will support Jetten’s formation of a coalition.  

D66’s success has come from a long march from obscurity. In 2006, they only just survived by a slither (winning only 3 seats) in the General Election and looked set to remain in the shadow of other parties from the centre ground, including the VVD. Many Liberal Democrats who attended the 2015 Autumn Conference in Bournemouth might remember a speech from Sophie in’t Veld, the then D66 MEP, who spoke about how, from a party’s lowest point, they can rebuild into a political force. This is something for Liberal Democrats to take note of.  

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Bernard Aris

Political experiences from a leaderless (!!) Social Liberal party in Corona times

By Bernard Aris | Thu 9th April 2020 - 10:56 am

Embed from Getty Images

First a revelation that will startle you: in strict formal, statutory terms, my government coalition social liberal party D66 has been leaderless since 10 October 2018. That’s when our long-standing leader Alexander Pechtold, who since becoming leader in our nadir days in 2006 (3 out of 150 Commons seats in a proportional system!) had brought us back up to 19 seats at the 2017 elections, and who brought us back in the sitting government coalition, suddenly stepped back and started doing other things in quango and semi-governmental circles.

The parliamentary party immediately appointed a new, 31-years old MP, Rob Jetten as parliamentary party leader; and in the D66 Standing Orders it says that in those circumstances, the parliamentary party leader becomes acting party leader.

To really be party leader, you have to have been our “Lijsttrekker” (party list frontman, political campaign leader) in a general election. The “parliamentary party leader but not party leader” construction has happened a couple of times in the 54-year D66 history; the parliamentary party leader in 1982-’86 refused to apply to become Lijsttrekker in 1986 because our party founder and first leader, Hans van Mierlo, wanted to lead us again to regain lost seats (with success; in 1986 we went from 6 to 9, and in 1986-1994 he led us to conquer 24 seats).

Not having a formal party leader doesn’t hinder in any way the normal functioning of the party organisation and parliamentary parties. In 1982-86 we prepared some groundbreaking legislative initiatives. The two main ones were: the first law legalizing and strictly regulating euthanasia in the whole world; and a law liberalizing opening hours for shops (giving opportunities to moms to return to work; giving students and school dropouts jobs).

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Bernard Aris

A Photographic Salute to the Lib Dem Resurrection

By Bernard Aris | Wed 22nd May 2019 - 10:00 am

I am sending our best wishes from D66 and The Netherlands for the European Elections tomorrow. Here are some pictures from our own European election campaign.

This first picture is a group of big letters “WEUROPE” (pronounce “We Europe”). D66 activists travel around big cities with these letters, to point out that we are the most pro-European Dutch party. The people behind the letters are D66 MP’s and activists.

The second picture is me standing in front of those letters, holding up the famous phrase from the Preamble to the LibDem Constitution.

The Liberal Democrats exist to build and safeguard a fair, free and open society, in which we seek to balance the fundamental values of liberty, equality and community, and in which no one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity.

The pair are meant as a salute from D66 to your resurrection struggle, as two comrades in arms in the same pro-EU struggle, embracing the same Social Liberal principles. Good luck!

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Bernard Aris

The Shamima Begum Case: As with Brexit, the Dutch are better prepared for what is coming anyway

By Bernard Aris | Thu 21st February 2019 - 12:37 pm

As has become a tradition over the past decades, the LibDems and Dutch sister party D66 sing from exactly the same hymn sheet on the subject of taking back “ISIS jihad brides” and their children from the Syrian-Kurdish YPG/SDF prisoner camps they’re housed in at the moment.

And just as usual, the ALDE right wing (in the Netherlands, Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s VVD) is fervently opposed to taking back anybody who has moved to the ISIS Caliphate since 2014, thus bending liberal, judicial and humanist principles to populist kneejerk reactions.

In the Netherlands, Rutte and the VVD know they stand alone (among non-populist, centrist, normal thinking parties) in refusing re-entry; and they know they’re ignoring a special article in the Dutch Constitution. The country of Grotius declares in article 90 of our constitution:

The government stimulates the development of the international rule of law and juridical order.

Scrupulous care for human rights, and the welcome (and where necessary judgment) to “lost sons”, are thus part of what Dutch governments and prime ministers must stand for. And D66 has a traditional attitude of caring about such aspects especially.

In a TV election debate in 2015, VVD leader and (then also) Prime Minister Rutte shocked everybody present by agreeing to the statement: “people travelling to the ISIS Caliphate are better off dying there and shouldn’t be allowed to return”.

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Bernard Aris

Dutch Parliamentary Brexit-watchers roundly condemn flippancy towards British people

By Bernard Aris | Thu 17th January 2019 - 10:00 am

As everybody reading the excellent study of history since Caesar’s times of the North Sea trade by Oxford historian and former BBC journalist Michael Pye, “The Edge of the World: How the North Sea made us what we are” can attest, the trade relations between the British/English and the Dutch (Frisians) Celtic tribes was the beginning of 20 centuries of close economic and ethnic ties. The DNA of inhabitants of areas from Kent to York is indistinguishable from that of people living in Friesland and Holland in the Netherlands; and Frisian is halfway the English and Dutch language. Migration and trade in wool, cloth, grain, herring, etc., been going on, even when Napoleon didn’t want it to (1803-1813); John Locke wrote important (Liberal) books seeking shelter here.

Ever since the 4th Anglo-Dutch war (1780-’84), the Dutch have recognised the British as their senior and vital partner in those economic and cultural relations; and the Dutch pressed general De Gaulle to admit England in the EEC for those same reasons.

But one aspect of how the Dutch see the British people and British politics has been fundamentally changed by the way the UK has been handling the Brexit problem, from the Referendum campaign in spring 2016 to the present day. That can be concluded by what 3 of the 4 official “Brexit Watching delegates” of the Dutch parliament said on Dutch public radio on Wednesday, 14th of January 2019; coincidentally those 3 were from parties of the present Dutch government coalition, so important advisors of both parliament and government.

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Bernard Aris

Love, actually

By Bernard Aris | Thu 13th December 2018 - 11:01 am

A message to Theresa May & all Britons on Brexit

Here is a video column from the D66 (Dutch Social-Liberal, pro-European sister party), featuring Kees Verhoeven, our MP for European Affairs.

Hope you enjoy!

https://twitter.com/D66/status/1072408573475463168

#makelovedontBrexit

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The Voice

Dutch Liberal Leader tells Britain: We want you back for good

By The Voice | Fri 19th October 2018 - 11:55 am

The new leader of the Dutch social liberal party D66 channelled Take That in a speech in Westminster about Brexit this week. Rob Jetten, who at 31 is the second youngest political leader in Dutch history, met MPs and peers – and impressed them too.

The speech is worth reading in full because this guy not only has some good political instincts, but he’s really funny and knows how to use sarcasm. He jokes about Theresa May’s dance moves, his habit of repeating things in speeches, his and Vince’s relative age and all sorts. But his summing up of the “epic tragedy” of Brexit is incredibly well observed communicated.

The word Brexit evokes an image of a Britain that has to endure confinement in some kind of enclosure. An enclosure from which it can escape by simply moving through an opening marked ‘exit’. It can get up and go. A simple, single act of will. You just have to say yes or no. Piece of cake. In or out. All you have to do is tick the box.

The attraction of the image the word Brexit evokes is obvious. Standing up and going for the “exit” has the flavour of decisiveness, independence, change and action. Much more attractive than being passive. Sitting on your hands. Keeping things as they are, afraid of what is outside the door. And then, of course, there is the unfortunate rubbery capacity of the word for it to be shaped into all kinds of attractive sounding derivations. Such as “brexiteer”.

Who would want to be something as stuffy and boring sounding as a “remainer” when you can be something as new-fangled and exciting as a “brexiteer”, dashing fearlessly through the exit to the great outdoors.

He explains why the process of Brexit is so bloody difficult:

There is no simple “exit” that can be taken. There is no simple separation. There is only tearing. Cutting. Destruction. Every single element, every tiny strand is connected. The mightiest riddles, such as the customs union and the Irish border, dominate the political conversation. But the truth is that it’s nitty-gritty tiny strands of fabric all the way down.

During its 45 years in the EU, Britain has imported many tens of thousands of European laws and regulations. Many thousands more have direct effect. EU law has had absolute supremacy over British law ever since British accession. A little understood legal reality. The fabric of Europe’s legal framework is the fabric of the UK’s political life.

And he reckons we can get out of this mess:

My visit here today, I’m ready to admit, is fuelled by what some might characterize as blind optimism. A blind optimism that says Britain can still escape this mess. Naturally I have no real hope of making a dent in the national discussion today. But I believe Barack Obama—one famous foreigner who unsuccessfully intervened in the Brexit debate—when he says that optimism is never blind if it is rooted in tradition.

And you do know a thing or two about tradition. You do have a tradition of escaping at the last minute. It is no coincidence Harry Houdini spent his best years in Britain. It is equally less surprising that the great escape artist Sherlock Holmes is a British literary figure.

Nor is it at all strange that the most memorable of JK Rowling’s writing involves Harry Potter escaping disaster. What is necessary for this great country to make its greatest escape? I’m no expert, which is good, because I’ve heard you’ve had quite enough of them. But I would hazard to guess that it would take a last minute miracle. And I’m here to say that we will welcome miracles as befits miracles: with biblical comprehension.

The full text of his speech is below:

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Bernard Aris

“Once more into the breach, my friends!” D66 Delivers On Its Feminist Social-Liberal Tradition in the New Dutch Coalition

By Bernard Aris | Fri 27th October 2017 - 2:55 pm

Part 2 (of 2): The people in the Dutch coalition: strong D66 women

For me the proudest D66 boast about the new Dutch coalition is that, where all four coalition parties said having more women in government is important, D66 with its social liberal feminist tradition dating from Aletta Jacobs and her British suffragist friends (see my earlier posting about her and Millicent Fawcett) actually delivered on this: with three female and one male Cabinet ministers, and with one male and one female minister, we have the highest proportion of women, and deliver the bulk of the female Cabinet ministers.

And they are not only there because of their gender; they’re quality persons, and we present the first lesbian vice prime minister in Dutch history (married, because D66 introduced gay marriage to the world). Let me give brief descriptions on their expertise and working past:

*) Kajsa Ollongren worked at the top in the Dutch prime minister’s department before becoming alderman and deputy mayor of Amsterdam. She put herself forward for parliament in 2006 when D66 went through an electoral nadir (after an unhappy time in a right-wing coalition), and in Amsterdam she got transnational platforms like Uber and AirBnB to respect the wishes of the local population and put limits on their operation. She is Home Secretary and vice prime minister. In her departmental days she and prime minister Rutte got along famously.

*) Sigrid Kaag who evolved from a British-educated (universities of Exeter and Oxford, and Cairo) Dutch top diplomat to a high-flying UN manager, negotiator and mediator, leading the UN chemical disarmament operation around the Syrian Assad dictatorship. She is Cabinet minister for Development Aid and International Trade, combining the humanitarian D66 instincts with hard-nosed practical experience.

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Bernard Aris

“Once more into the breach, my friends!” D66 delivers on its Environmental, Education and Feminist Social-Liberal Tradition in the New Dutch Coalition

By Bernard Aris | Thu 26th October 2017 - 3:58 pm

Part 1 (of 2): The coalition agreement: many D66 issues, initiatives

Due to the fragmented party-political parliament which resulted from the Dutch general elections this spring, forming a coalition was always going to be a difficult process. Setting aside populist protest parties like Geert Wilders’ PVV, people expected the political center (from center-left to center-right) to play an active role in building a workable coalition. The only exception was about the PvdA (Dutch Labour party): because they lost disastrously after having been the junior party in a two-party government (led by Mark Rutte, leader of the VVD, and “Green-Right” ally of …

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Bernard Aris

Social Liberals: winning against Populism because we have “street force”

By Bernard Aris | Wed 26th April 2017 - 8:49 am

First of all, on behalf of the tens of thousands D66 party members (over 25.000; and we’re gaining members every week for the past year,  our heartfelt congratulations to the Lib Dems on passing the 100.000 members threshold. And you’re not done yet, I know.

If we look to our Spanish and French social-liberal, pro-EU sister parties, Ciudadános and Macrons movement “En Marche”, they too are booking spectacular results in gaining members, and getting members active on the street. According to the French Wikipedia and the Economist, En Marche (EM) claimed 88.000 members in October 2016, and  250.000 now.  The Economist reports about EM-activists canvassing the British way in Strassbourg streets (and elsewhere).

That is the big difference I noticed in the Dutch European elections (2014) and our recent General Elections (March 2017):

  • whereas D66 activists were visible on the (high) streets and at train station entrances handing out leaflets months before (and until) election day,
  • other progressive parties (PvdA/Labour, GreenLeft, and old-style Socialists\SP) were strangely absent, where they dominated the scene until about ten years ago,
  • the center-right parties (VVD/NatLibs and CDA/Christian Democrats) and PVV never were very active in that way.

D66 has also started canvassing the British way in “friendly” neighbourhoods, talking to people on the doorstep; but we seldom hear that from other Dutch parties. Only PvdA/Labour appears to do that, and the Socialists/SP say they do it.

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Bernard Aris

Churchill inspires D66 fightback against Trumpism and Farage’s people-expulsing “Hard Brexit”

By Bernard Aris | Wed 1st February 2017 - 2:45 pm

This past week, both the Guardian and the Sun  had articles about the deputy ALDE liberal group leader Sophie in’t Veld  in the European Parliament getting involved in the mistreatment of ordinary EU citizens, living and working in the UK and being married to Britons, by the May government and its over-enthusiastic Brexiteer ministers. Both newspapers only failed to mention which party Mrs In’t Veld belongs to: none other than D66, the social-liberal inheritors of the pre-War VDB.

As one of three parties at the origins of Dutch abortion legislation (very similar to David Steel’s brilliant Liberal inheritance on that point in Britain), D66 fully supports the initiative by our Trade & Development minister Mrs Ploumen to try to compensate family planning advice and abortion services in the Third World, scrapped by Mr. Trump and his Christian-fundamentalist Vice President Pence. We’ll support continuing that compensatory policy in the next Dutch coalition government formed in the coming summer.

People who know about the career of Winston Churchill will be outraged by the fact that president Trump, who cosies up to jingoist-Russian, NATO-threatening and EU-subverting president Putin, put up a bust of Churchill in his Oval Office. You only have to look up Churchill’s Wikipedia item to see that from 1934 onwards (Hitler walking out of the League of Nations and abandoning his Versailles restrictions), Churchill sought and got data about German re-armament (Luftwaffe) and harried the appeasing Tory governments to re-arm Britain. An enormous contrast; Trump is behaving more like the self-seeking, protectionist European governments, not paying attention to foreign policy, which proved such easy pickings for Hitler and (in Poland and the Baltic) Stalin.

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Bernard Aris

Dutch “Liberal” VVD cosying up to the Tories and distancing itself from “European” Liberals

By Bernard Aris | Mon 5th December 2016 - 4:56 pm

vvdIn the past week, attentive British citizens could see a clear divide opening up between the two Dutch ALDE member parties, the EU-enthusiasts and Social Liberals (in Beveridge’s tradition) D66, and the populist (see the enduring stature of prominent ex-leaders like Hans Wiegel) VVD.

On Monday, a short furore erupted in the British tabloid media over conversation notes gleaned from the writing pad of a Tory political assistant coming out of Downing Street 10 (or 9: the Brexit Department). She was the assistant of Tory party vice-chairman (International) Mark Field, and she and Field were accompanying foreign visitors who obviously had had a meeting about Brexit. The notes appeared to suggest that the Tory Brexit strategy is as Boris Johnson sometime brags: “have your cake and eat it”. Nobody asked or mentioned who those foreigners were: the leader, Mr. Halbe Zijlstra, and Foreign Affairs spokesman, Mr. Han ten Broeke, of the VVD parliamentary party.

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Bernard Aris

They can’t keep us social liberals down – congratulations from D66

By Bernard Aris | Fri 13th May 2016 - 5:55 pm

Dear fellow Liberal Democrats,

My most sincere congratulations with your encouraging results at the local & regional elections last week.

A special “congratulations” to the batch of young Liberal Democrats, who became party members and activists after your/our meltdown in 2015, and got elected within the year. I enjoyed seeing one of them, Caroline Warner, making it to the BBC online liveblog of results with her tweet, after “waking up [being} a councillor” in Tandridge.

The BBC clearly was aware of this important aspect of this Lib Dem revival…

I attended your Autumn Conference last year, and was impressed with the quality of that new generation of “post-meltdown members” who had already been chosen as constituency representatives and mounted the rostrum delivering impressive, passionate speeches on all kinds of subjects. A promise for the future indeed!

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Bernard Aris

Opinion: The LibDems will bring consistency in an unstable British political landscape

By Bernard Aris | Mon 11th May 2015 - 5:22 pm

A view from the Dutch Social Liberals (D66)

Before I dive into my analysis of the present British political instability, my commiserations with all the LibDem activists (& dogs), cadres, councillors and parliamentary candidates who got caught in the pincer of

  • Labour seeking revenge for their well-deserved ousting in 2010, and
  • the Tories repeating the betrayal of their coalition partners of the Electoral System referendum.

We in D66 got clobbered in the same way when we participated in our first government coalition (1973-’77; D66 was founded in 1966), but that was because we simultaneously attempted a realignment of Dutch progressive politics via a merger …

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