It must become more difficult for parties to win seats in the House of Representatives. Former education minister Jo Ritzen and a group of like-minded people have started a petition for the introduction of an electoral threshold.
Parties that do not receive enough votes in the elections to win at least three seats in the House of Representatives should be banned from now on with such an electoral threshold. On the internet this weekend is the website Increasekiesdrempel.nl launched. The initiators want to collect as many signatures as possible in the coming months and then present them to the House of Representatives after 15 March.
In the last parliamentary elections, seventeen parties entered parliament, a record. That number has now risen to twenty due to divisions. According to the initiators, this will only make parliament weaker. “Half of the parties in the House have fewer than five seats,” they say. “Around the Binnenhof, the one-liners for the supporters and the next elections predominate. As a result, supervisory and legislative tasks lose out, especially in smaller factions where attention has to be divided over many subjects.”
Now a party wins a seat if it receives at least 0.67 percent of the vote. If it is up to the authors of the petition, that percentage will be increased to 2 by law. This means that a party must win at least three seats. If that limit had applied in the previous elections, BBB, Bij1 and 50Plus (now Groep Den Haan) would not have entered the House.
Election threshold in other countries
There is currently no political majority in the House for the introduction of an electoral threshold. It does exist in neighboring countries. In Germany and Belgium, a party must get at least 5 percent of the vote to get into parliament, in Sweden 4 percent. Last year, a poll of One today that 60 percent of the Dutch would be in favor of introducing an electoral threshold to prevent the fragmentation of parliament.
In addition to Jo Ritzen, the petition’s initiators include former State Secretary Yvonne van Rooy and economist Barbara Baarsma.
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