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This article lists political parties in the Netherlands. The country has a multi-party system with numerous political parties, and any one party has little chance of gaining power alone; parties work with each other to form coalition governments.
Contents
- National political parties
- Parties represented in the States General and/or European Parliament
- Parties without representation in the States General and/or European Parliament
- Regional and local political parties
- European Netherlands
- Defunct political parties
- See also
- References
- External links
The lower house of the legislature, the House of Representatives, is elected by a national party-list system of proportional representation. There is a legal threshold of 1/150 for getting a seat, so a party can win a seat only with at least two-thirds percent (0.67%) of the national vote, roughly one seat for every 67,000 votes.
The first national political party was the Anti-Revolutionary Party (ARP), founded in 1879. [1]
No party has come close to winning a majority of seats since the introduction of proportional representation in 1918. [2] All governments since then have been coalitions between two or more parties. However, there is a broad consensus on the basic principles of the political system, with all parties having to adjust their goals to some extent in order to have a realistic chance at being part of the government.
