The first leader of the ChristenUnie, Kars Veling, died on Wednesday at the age of 77. That reports It Nederlands Dagblad. Veling has been in the Senate since the early nineties and was already committed to a merger of his party, the Reformed Political Association (GPV) with the Reformed Political Federation (RPF). In the end, the two parties formed the ChristenUnie together in 2000.
Veling was a party leader in the second parliamentary elections in which the new party participated. These elections in 2002 ended up on a disappointing result: of the combined five seats that the two parties had, ChristenUnie lost one. That had to do with, among other things, the rise of Pim Fortuyn, Veling thought, who made people a choice for stability: “For many ChristenUnie voters, Jan Peter Balkenende’s CDA was a kind of safe haven that caused a break. That was an important factor in our disappointing result,” he told it at the time Nederlands Dagblad.
ProDemos
After these elections, he was the chairman of the party for a few months, but he was pushed aside by the board of the party. After his departure from politics, Veling went back to education – before his political career he had already taught – and became rector of the public Johan de Witt College in The Hague. After 2011 he worked as director of ProDemos, the Hague ‘Huis voor Democracy and Reches State’, which, among other things, makes the Stemwijzer and organizes tours in the Lower House for students.