List of political parties in the Netherlands

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.

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.