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 no threshold for getting a seat, so a party will win a seat with only two-thirds percent 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.

No party has come close to winning a majority of seats since the introduction of proportional representation in 1918. 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.

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