The ‘f-word’ is regularly heard on Monday at a joint member evening of PvdA and GL in Luxor Live, the municipal pop stage in Arnhem. to merge. Is it smart to merge as PvdA and GL? The brand new PvdA party leader – Attje Kuiken – and GL leader Jesse Klaver tried to convince the members of both parties of far-reaching cooperation.
But she doesn’t always succeed in that. “I already have to convince GL’ers to become greener,” says a GL member. “I am afraid that the battle will be even more difficult in a merger party.” And PvdA members are also concerned, they tell Kuiken. “I want Henk and Ingrid back, that’s what we were founded for,” shouts a PvdA member who calls himself a ‘conservative’.
Some party members are downright angry about a possible joint group in next year’s elections to the Senate. “The reason the left is doing so badly is that it simply lacks left leadership and a strong left narrative,” laments GL member Sabine Scharwachter. “We are not going to solve that by suddenly chatting as left-wing parties about the future of the left. I’m really curious what the hell we’re doing here actually.” Her tirade leads to applause in the hall, which is filled with several hundred members.
Kuiken remains optimistic: “Every time we are overtaken by the right,” says the PvdA leader. “I don’t want that, I don’t accept that for the Netherlands. That is why I believe that we should join forces. Because we share the same ideals: that inequality should not be allowed, that poverty is not a natural phenomenon.” Klaver also does not want to be fooled. According to him, it is ‘a strategy of the right’ to separate PvdA and GL.
Both within GL and PvdA unrest about merger plans
Within GL there has been unrest for some time about merger plans of the party top with the PvdA in the Senate. In a petition that circulates among GL members, such a merger is called a threat ‘to the survival of an independent GL’. “A broad left-wing cooperation is fine, going together with one party: no!”, says the petition.
The GL board has announced that it will organize a members’ referendum on the amalgamation of the GL and PvdA factions in the Senate during next year’s Provincial Council elections. That decision would represent a ‘far-reaching and irreversible step towards a party merger’.
According to prominent members such as Femke Roosma (former GL faction leader in Amsterdam), Selçuk Akinci (ex-alderman in Breda), Jasper Blom (former director of the Scientific Bureau of GL) and Nienke Homan (deputy of Groningen), a merger is ‘substantive not logical,” the petition reads. “It is not for nothing that the parties are each in a different European group. The mutual differences are not negligible; our ideals and history are far apart.”
A joint list for the Senate is also sensitive to the PvdA. In the short term, this type of cooperation is ‘associated with a great risk’, according to a leaked advice from members of the scientific bureau of the PvdA and political scientists to the PvdA board. According to the PvdA members, a merger with GL takes ‘a lot of energy and persuasiveness’ and is possibly ‘very forced’.
PvdA mastodons Frans Timmermans and Marjolein Moorman – who are both also tipped as future party leaders – recently spoke out in favor of far-reaching cooperation with GL. On Monday evening, Klaver and Kuiken rallied behind it. Klaver: “What I’m kind of done with is that we talk about left-wing cooperation all the time, but don’t dare to take any real steps.”