liberal parties in the netherlands defined

Two Dutch parties can legitimately claim to be part of the liberal famille spirituelle, the Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie (People's Party for Freedom and Democracy, or VVD in the Dutch acronym) which adopted its present name in 1948 and which has been a member of the Liberal International since 1960, and Democraten '66 (or D'66 – recently renamed D66 without apostrophe), which, established in 1966 as a party of radical reform, consciously sought to break the hold of traditional class and religious alignments in Dutch politics in favour of a far going programme of institutional reform.

Of these two parties, the VVD undoubtedly has the older and better title. The 1948 party grew from the Partij van de Vrijheid (Freedom Party) which was established in 1946 as a new incarnation of the pre-Second World War Liberale Staatspartij De Vrijheidsbond. That party in turn had been formed in 1921 to collect a number of different liberal and other parties which had developed side by side in a period of limited franchise and a district system before the First World War, and in the aftermath of that war. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the liberals had regarded themselves (and had been regarded by others) as very much a dominant force in Dutch politics. They had represented the cause of constitutional reform – which had led in 1848 to a comparatively early breakthrough of responsible parliamentary government in the Netherlands, under a constitutional revision which was very much the work of a liberal Professor of Constitutional Law, Johan Rudolf Thorbecke.