Netherlands

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Recent History

The Roman Catholic People’s Party came to power in 1959 and maintained its dominance in the lower house after the elections of 1963 and 1967. However, the governing coalitions that the party formed in the 1960s proved unstable. Unrest in the Netherlands Antilles in 1969 led to marines being dispatched to assist police in riot control. The inflation of the 1960s continued into the 1970s as a major economic and political problem. Wage and price controls were imposed in 1970, and taxes increased in 1971. In the elections of 1971 the four-party governing coalition lost its majority; two months of negotiations followed before a coalition headed by the Anti-Revolutionary Party emerged to form a government. This Cabinet fell in 1972, however, and a caretaker government ruled until May 1973, when Joop den Uyl, leader of the Labour Party, was sworn in as prime minister of a five-party coalition. When Suriname attained full independence in 1975, the sudden influx of hundreds of thousands of Surinamese immigrants added to the problems of the Dutch economy.

In 1977, following parliamentary elections in the spring, den Uyl’s governing coalition fell apart over proposed reforms. A new prime minister, Christian Democrat Andreas van Agt, was sworn in later in the year. In 1980 Princess Beatrix succeeded to the throne on the abdication of her mother, Queen Juliana. Van Agt’s Cabinet lost its parliamentary majority in May 1981, but he formed a new coalition that lasted from September 1981 to May 1982. Parliamentary elections were held in September 1982, after which van Agt unexpectedly resigned the Christian Democrat leadership. His successor as party head was Ruud Lubbers, who formed a new coalition in November 1982 and remained in power until 1994.

At a 1983 constitutional conference it was agreed that, from 1986, Aruba would no longer be part of the Netherlands Antilles, but would become a separate territory within the Kingdom of the Netherlands. This separate status was due to last for ten years; from 1996 Aruba was to have become fully independent. However, in 1994 it was decided that Aruba would remain within the kingdom after 1996. The year previously, the Netherlands had become the first country to allow doctors to practise euthanasia at the request of terminally ill patients, within strict guidelines. Official statistics released in early 1995, indicated that since 1993 some 3,000 people had taken advantage of the new legislation to end their lives.

The May 1994 general elections brought defeat for the Christian Democrats. The party’s heavy losses were attributed in part to rising unemployment and to substantial cutbacks in social welfare spending since the late 1980s. The Labour Party was the largest single parliamentary group, although it had also suffered some losses. After almost four months of wrangling, the Labour Party leader and the new prime minister, Wim Kok, put together a coalition with the right-wing People’s Party and the centre-left Democrats 66; for the first time in more than 20 years the Christian Democrats were not part of the government. The new coalition’s policy proposals included more cuts in social welfare benefits, as well as large-scale reductions in defence spending.

February 1995 resurrected the spectre of the 1953 flood disaster. More than 250,000 people were evacuated from the east of the country amid fears that the region’s river dykes would not withstand the huge pressure of floodwaters coming down the Rhine and Meuse rivers from Germany and France. The dykes held and the people returned to their homes, while the government announced that the river dyke reinforcement programme would be speeded up. In March 1996 the flagship Dutch aviation company Fokker collapsed, bringing the largest mass industrial redundancy in the country’s history. The legislature voted in April to tighten the country’s liberal policy on the sale of marijuana, and to extend marriage rights to homosexual couples; the latter motion was passed by 81 votes to 60, but with no legislative effect. Abolition of conscription was announced in August. In January 1998 a law giving wider civil rights to homosexual couples came into force. The reform embraced property and pension rights, allowed for the same tax treatment as married couples, alimony on separation, and allowed for adoption rights. This legislation was significantly extended in December 2000 when the Dutch senate voted in favour of full equality with heterosexual couples, giving homosexual couples in the Netherlands the broadest support of civil rights anywhere in Europe, including those of marriage and child adoption. The first marriage ceremony, for three same sex couples, took place on April 1, 2001.

A general election in May 1998 to the Second Chamber, the lower house of the bicameral legislature, gave a clear endorsement to Prime Minister Wim Kok and his Labour Party. In April 1999, two Libyan men who were suspected of bombing the Pan American jet that exploded over Lockerbie in Scotland were taken to the Netherlands for trial, which commenced in May 2000. Their arrival was the culmination of lengthy negotiations and followed a ruling of the International Court of Justice in the Hague concerning the Court's jurisdiction over the case. The trial was conducted on a former military base, Camp Zeist, near Utrecht, that was considered Scottish territory for the duration of the trial, in order that the case could be tried under the jurisdiction of Scottish law. On January 31, 2001, Abdel Baset al-Megrahi was found guilty in a unanimous decision by the special Scottish three-judge court. His co-defendant, Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, was found not guilty.

In November 2000 the Netherlands became the first country in the world to legalize a code of practice for euthanasia and assisted suicide. Since a declaration by the Dutch Supreme Court in 1984, voluntary euthanasia had been partly decriminalized but not legalized. The Dutch parliament endorsed the new law in April 2001. In a second landmark development, in April the world’s first homosexuals were legally married in a ceremony in Amsterdam. In January 2002, the Netherlands adopted Euro notes and coins in line with 11 other European nations.

The UN International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia started in the Hague in February 2002 with the high-profile indictments against the former president of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milošević. There are expected to be up to 100 other individuals charged with crimes arising from the conflict in the Balkans in the 1990s.

In April 2002, a month before parliamentary elections, Wim Kok and his Cabinet resigned following a report, published by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, which blamed the Dutch government, the army, and the UN for their failure to protect the “safe haven” of Srebrenica, in Bosnia, during the Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian War. Elections to the Second Chamber of the States-General, held in May, were marred by the assassination of anti-immigration politician Pim Fortuyn a few days beforehand. The Christian Democratic Appeal party won 43 seats (28 per cent), the populist List Pim Fortuyn (LPF) party took 26 seats (17 per cent), the conservative-liberal People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy won 24 seats (15.4 per cent), and the Labour Party—23 seats (15.1 per cent). Jan Peter Balkenende, leader of Christian Democrats, was sworn in in July as prime minister.

The new coalition government, however, held together for only three months before in-fighting within the LPF led to the collapse of Balkenende’s government. In new elections in January 2003, the ruling CDA’s support held steady but the LPF lost 18 seats; the beneficiary was the Labour Party. Balkenende again sought to put together a viable coalition government with representation from the CDA, the VVD (the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy), and Democrats 66.

In April 2003, Volkert van der Graaf was sentenced to 18 years’ imprisonment for the murder of Pim Fortuyn. An animal rights activist, van der Graaf claimed that he had assassinated the right-wing politician to protect vulnerable members of society.

Balkenende supported the proposed constitution for the European Union drawn up by a convention headed by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the former president of France. However, when the constitution was put before the Dutch voters in a referendum held in June 2005, it was resoundingly rejected. Balkenende’s coalition government collapsed in late June over an immigration issue concerning the citizenship of a Somali-born former MP but was re-formed the following month without the participation of the D-66 party, which had raised the original issue. Elections previously scheduled for May 2007 were brought forward to November 2006 in response.

In the general election the CDA secured 41 seats in the 150-seat assembly with the Labour Party gaining 33 and the Socialists 25. Balkenende was expected to be able to put together a coalition but it was not until February 2007 that a three-party coalition, comprising the Christian Democrats, the Christian Union, and the Labour Party, was constructed.