Political party membership slump hits state funding

DutchNews, May 3, 2016

Three of the Netherlands biggest political parties are facing financial problems because of declining memberships, the Volkskrant said on Tuesday. 

The Christian Democrats (CDA), Labour (PvdA) and the right-wing Liberal VVD are all reaching a ‘critical point’ in terms of membership, the paper said, and some senior officials have raised the issue of funding Declwith the home affairs ministry. 

Political parties in the Netherlands get government funding partly on the basis of the size of their membership base. Geert Wilders’ anti-immigration PVV does not get this support because he is the only member.

In total, taxpayers spent €1.9m subsidising political parties last year. 

Slump

The CDA remains the biggest Dutch party with some 51,000 members, compared with 143,000 members in 1981. Labour party membership has slumped from 110,000 to 46,000 and the VVD from 93,000 to 28,000. 

Political parties are essential to democracy, constitutional law professor Paul Bovend’eert told the paper.

‘Parties select candidates for parliament, the provinces and local government,’ he said. ‘In addition, they write the party manifestos which form the basis of government coalition agreements.’

Related Article:

"You Don’t Know How the Frog Jumps"–  Jan11, 2011 (Kryon Channelling by Lee Carroll) - (Text version)

“…  Last week, I gave you a message about the potentials of 2011. And there were those in this room who attended. I'm going to repeat something I said there, for you need to hear it and it has to do with politics. It would seem intuitive to every single Human Being in the room that in order to accomplish what you do as Americans in Congress, you must have at least two parties. For that is the way it has always been - the red and the blue.

What if I told you that there will come a time when there will be no parties? You might then say, "Well, that's impossible, Kryon, because you're not Human and you don't know how funding works." You might say, "It has to be a party that creates the power to raise money for the ones who cannot, and then the funding is spread around and this is the way we work. If you didn't have parties, you'd have no funding. Nobody could advertise, and no one could get elected."

Oh, really?

Are you aware right now, that you have a president who was elected on the Internet? He figured it out. When everybody can talk to everyone, you have plenty of funding. A few dollars here, a few dollars there. You talk to millions at the same time, they talk to millions at the same time. It's a new paradigm of communication. The young people know all about it, and you can't stop it. Watch for more from this new paradigm.

It is worldwide communication, one person at a time. It doesn't matter how many laws you pass, and it doesn't matter what you decide about who is in charge of it, you can't stop it. It's out of the bag now, and the communities of the young are going to be communicating. This is how the politicians are going to be communicating to you, literally coming into your home in a holographic form perhaps, explaining their position one by one, without a party. Then you will elect them to your Congress without a party and they will sit in the chairs without a division and there will be no such thing as the "other side of the aisle."

And that, Human Being, is called unity and there is a paradigm that you cannot even imagine. And it's in the works. And then you'll have a Congress that works together and gets things done without the current duality.  ….”