Four days after Chilean generals destroyed Salvador Allende’s left-wing Popular Front government in a coup in 1973, the PvdA put an end to the idea of uniting progressive Netherlands in one party. At the first party congress after the entrance of Prime Minister Joop den Uyl earlier in May, the Social Democrats stabbed a knife in the back of that “crazy adventure“, as D66 founder Hans van Mierlo had called a Progressive People’s Party (PVP) two and a half years earlier.
In doing so, the PvdA violated the promise of chairman André van der Louw, who had promised in a confidential meeting, on the day of the swearing-in of the most progressive government of all time, that the party would participate in a “federal partnership”. With 43 seats in the House of Representatives and Den Uyl in the Catshuis, the PvdA suddenly had no interest in the thirteen seats that PPR (7) and D66 (6) could bring.
The PvdA then acted very progressively for more than three years. Even in the Council of Ministers, Den Uyl made a distinction between his “progressive” majority at the table and the “Christian Democrats” on the other side. But that was short-lived. After 1977, the PvdA suffered victory defeat after victory defeat – with the exception of 1994 and 1998 – before shrinking to 9 seats in 2017-2021, barely more than the seats of D66 and PPR that it had proudly rejected in 1973.
There is a lot of fear lurking in the background about being dismissed as a radical left
Van Mierlo’s idea to shake up the fragmented pillarized system with a “progressive concentration” was taken up in 1972 by former European Commissioner and PvdA member Sicco Mansholt. After the Club of Rome’s alarming report Limits to Growth, Mansholt concluded that environmental conservation and class struggle had to go hand in hand. The classic materialist approach to inequality – “beefsteak socialism”, as PvdA economist Hans van der Doel called it, no longer offered any relief. With the impending depletion of the ecosystem, a new kind of redistribution issue emerged.
In the consultation body of the three progressive parties, Van Mierlo said this to Van Louw when the latter appealed to his socialist credentials: “D66 has nothing to do with socialism. But that does not mean that we have nothing to do with people who feel for such a doctrine. Charging: before you take away a car from the worker, you have to take away three from the man with four cars.”
There is an analogy between the fallen PVP then and PRO Netherlands half a century later. The principles of the merger party may not be very creative and paying more attention to rights than to dutiesPRO also wants to be a “people’s party”. In the program, working people are not subordinated to cargo bike parents. The new party does not even shy away from the concept of ‘class’. The suggestion that she breaks with the social democratic tradition of the PvdA – according to former party leader Ad Melkertwho led the party in vain in the turning point year 2002, the term labor would have disappeared into thin air – is therefore nostalgia, demagoguery, or both.
The question is of course whether these principles will hold up in the practice of power formation. There is a lot of fear lurking in the background about being dismissed as a radical left; as non-ministerial.
Whether the name PRO adequately covers it is another question. Why not just revitalize the PVP, as Melkert wondered? The reason that name was dropped is probably prosaic. PVP alliterates too much with PVV and could be counterproductive at the ballot box. Moreover, the domain name pvp.nl already occupied: by the patient counselors in psychiatry.
