International

Last week former Dutch Labour Party (PvdA) minister Jo Ritzen astonished friend and foe alike with his proposal for a new European movement in the EP. This would involve cooperation between the PvdA, the German Social Democrats and Greens, our own centrist D66 and the British Labour Party. The call appeared on Friday in Dutch national daily Trouw, but the next day saw a swift reaction – none of the political parties named knew anything about Ritzen’s plans. Thijs Berman, PvdA leader in the European Parliament, invited Ritzen to come to Brussels for a week’s training course in order to brush up his knowledge of the EP a little. That made me think that I might dedicate my weeklog this week to the phenomenon of political groups in the EP. Perhaps this might help?

We usually refer – in Dutch - to the SP’s ‘eurofractie’ – the European Parliamentary group. Of course the SP is a Dutch party, not a European one, but the European Parliament is keen to see parties from different countries working together and would eventually like to see European political parties. The Greens were the first past the post: Groen Links (‘Green Left’) is not only a Dutch party but also a section of the European Greens. In the Green Left’s national programme you can find parts of the programme of the European Greens, and the party regularly uses the European logo alongside its own. The Christian Democrats also have a European party, the European People’s Party (EPP), although in the Netherlands the CDA operates rather more independently of the EPP than the Green Left does in relation to the European Greens.

The social democrats are rather more loosely organised, though the PvdA is affiliated to the European Parliamentary Group of the Socialists and Democrats (S&D). Still, you won’t see the logo of the S&D used alongside the PvdA’s own logo in the near future, and the S&D is more of a cooperation group than a true European political party. The same goes for the liberals in the EP, a group to which both the centrist D66 and more right-wing VVD belong. The SP belongs to the United Left, a political group but one which does not impose discipline. This means that all members are free to vote as they wish, though the group does produce advisory voting lists. Probably the United Left is just about the loosest group in the EP.

Ritzen’s proposal for not only bundling together the forces of social democracy, but also for involving D66 and the German Greens in this cooperation will never succeed. It would mean that left and right would have to form a single group within which the liberals, social democrats and Greens would have to fuse. It would be the same as asking the Dutch employers’ organisation, the VNO-NCW, to fuse with our trade union federation, the FNV. In short, Ritzen might be the head of the University of Maastricht, but his proposal was, for all that, a bit dim-witted.