Dutch politics: why nobody governs the Netherlands alone

Why the Netherlands has no constitutional court

Article 120 of the Dutch constitution forbids the courts from testing an act of parliament against it, and the prohibition has stood since 1848. A judge who believes a law breaches a constitutional right has no power to say so and no power to set the law aside, and there is no separate tribunal that does. The constitution describes what the institutions are and what rights citizens hold, and then leaves the question of whether parliament has honoured it to parliament.

That leaves a gap, and treaty law fills it. International treaties and the Statute of the Kingdom outrank Dutch law including the constitution itself, and judges are permitted to test legislation against those. A rights case that would be argued on constitutional grounds in Germany or Italy is argued in the Netherlands on the European Convention on Human Rights. Everything below the rank of an act of parliament, a policy guideline or a provincial or municipal by-law, can be tested for constitutionality in the ordinary way.

The amendment procedure explains why the document is treated as settled rather than as a live instrument. A change has to pass both chambers by simple majority, at which point parliament is dissolved and a general election held. The new chambers must then pass the same change again by a two-thirds majority in each. An amendment therefore costs an election, and the electorate is formally interposed between the first reading and the second.

How the two chambers divide the work

Parliament is the States General and it sits in two chambers in the same building in The Hague. They are not equal and the inequality is deliberate.

The lower house does the legislating. The upper house reviews what arrives and votes it up or down whole, which makes it a check on drafting quality rather than a second forum for negotiation. Because it is chosen by provincial councillors elected on their own cycle, its composition lags the lower house by up to four years, and a coalition that commands the House can find itself short in the Senate. Members are elected on a personal mandate rather than a party one. A representative who leaves a party keeps the seat, and can sit as an independent or join another group. A member who resigns hands the seat back to the party, which passes it to the next unelected name on its list.

Why almost any party can win a seat

For a general election the entire country is one constituency. Parties submit a ranked list, voters may cast a preference vote that reorders it, and seats are distributed in proportion to the national total.

There is no separate electoral threshold. The quota, the number of votes a single seat costs, was about 0.7% of the national vote at the 2023 election, and that quota is the only barrier. A party with the support of roughly one voter in a hundred and fifty is in parliament. The effect on the shape of the chamber is direct. A single-issue party can hold two or three seats indefinitely without ever approaching government, and several do: an animal welfare party has sat continuously since 2006, and a confessional Protestant party has returned two or three seats at every election for a century. Neither is a spoiler in the sense a threshold is designed to exclude, because neither can be excluded by one.

It also means the fragments cannot be ignored. A coalition needs seventy-six seats and the largest party has not held more than a quarter of the chamber since 2012, so three or four parties are required and the smallest of them is negotiating from a position it did not have to win to hold.

The consequence is a chamber that regularly holds fourteen or fifteen distinct parties, and a party system in which no party has ever won an absolute majority. Every government since the modern franchise was introduced has been a coalition, and the arithmetic of assembling one out of fragments is the central fact of Dutch political life. Formations are correspondingly long: the process that followed the March 2021 election ran for nine months.

What a Dutch cabinet formation involves

The government consists formally of the monarch and the ministers, though the monarch takes no part in decisions. The ministers together form the Council of Ministers, which meets on Fridays and initiates policy and legislation. Ministers without portfolio have been permissible since 1939.

The prime minister chairs that council and sets its agenda, and cannot appoint or dismiss a minister without the cabinet's own agreement. The office has no large staff behind it. Its weight has grown since the 1960s through media attention, the demands of policy coordination and European summitry rather than through any change in its formal powers. The formation itself moved out of the palace in 2012. Before that the monarch appointed the informateur who chaired the talks, after consulting the leaders of every parliamentary party; the advice was public, so the monarch could not easily depart from it, but what was said inside was not. Since 2012 the House of Representatives appoints the informateur itself, in open session.

Why Dutch mayors are appointed rather than elected

Every council in the Netherlands is directly elected and no executive is. Municipal councils are elected every four years and so are the twelve provincial councils, but the mayor of a municipality is appointed by the national government and answers to the Minister of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, and each province has a King's Commissioner appointed the same way. Aldermen and provincial executives are appointed by, and answerable to, their own councils.

The arrangement makes the executive of a Dutch city a national appointment sitting beside a locally elected assembly. It has been argued about for decades and survives, and the argument for it is that a mayor who owes nothing to a local majority can act against one.

Municipalities themselves have been consolidated hard. There were 342 of them in 2023, against more than a thousand in the middle of the last century, and each merger moved services further from the people using them and made the surviving council larger and more professional. The two largest cities are subdivided again into administrative districts with limited powers of their own.

What the water boards actually govern

The water boards are the oldest surviving Dutch institution of government and they are the one nobody else has. They run the inland waterways, the groundwater levels, the polders, the dykes and the pumping stations, and they levy their own tax on the residents of their area to pay for it.

Their boards are elected. Residents vote for most of the seats and the remainder are reserved for the interests with the most at stake in the outcome: companies, farmers and the nature conservation organisations. A body with a tax power, an elected board and a single technical remit is an unusual thing to find inside a unitary state, and it exists because holding the water back is older than the state is.

How consensus gets built outside parliament

A great deal of Dutch decision-making happens before a bill reaches the chamber, in bodies that have no vote and are hard to ignore.

Every piece of proposed legislation goes to the Council of State for advice. The advice does not bind, but the cabinet must answer it and the answer shapes the parliamentary debate that follows. The same council is also the highest court for administrative law, and it is chaired ex officio by the monarch, who leaves the work to a vice-president and to councillors drawn from the judiciary, the professoriate and former ministers. The Social and Economic Council does the equivalent job for economic and social policy. Two thirds of its members come from the trade union federations and the employers' organisations, including the organisation representing farmers; the remaining third is appointed by the government and includes academic economists and representatives of the central bank and the economic forecasting bureau. It advises early, and its advice is likewise difficult to set aside.

Beside these sit the other High Councils of State, which the constitution makes explicitly independent: the Court of Audit, which examines whether public money was raised and spent lawfully and effectively, and the National Ombudsman, which investigates how citizens were actually treated. Neither can compel anything. Both publish, and the publication is the instrument.

What pillarisation left behind

Until the middle of the 1960s Dutch society was formally segmented. Four pillars, Catholic, Protestant, socialist and liberal, each ran its own schools, trade unions, newspapers, broadcasters, sports clubs and political party, and a citizen could pass a whole life inside one. Contact between them happened at the top, among the leaderships, and it was there that the country was governed.

The structure dissolved quickly. Voters born after the war felt less bound to it, the voting age fell from twenty-three to twenty-one in 1963 and to eighteen in 1972, and new parties formed to appeal to people the pillars no longer held. The three Christian parties lost close to half their vote and merged in 1977. In 1994 a coalition was formed without Christian democrats for the first time in eighty years.

What replaced the pillars was a wider and shallower field: parties organised around a single policy rather than a social bloc, and parties formed by splitting off an existing one. Of those sitting after the November 2023 election, several had existed for less than a decade, and two of the larger ones had broken away from parties still in the chamber beside them.

What that costs is institutional memory. A party system rebuilt every fifteen years carries few figures who were in the room the last time a comparable bargain was struck, and the formations lengthen accordingly.

What survived the pillars is the habit they produced: government by negotiated agreement among leaderships, with the terms settled in advance and in private. The institutional apparatus described above is that habit in permanent form.

Where the Kingdom ends and the country begins

The Netherlands is one of four constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, alongside Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten. The Kingdom has its own founding document, the Statute, which describes a federal relationship among the four and outranks the Dutch constitution.

The constitution itself applies to the Netherlands, which means the European territory together with Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba in the Caribbean. Those three are not provinces and not ordinary municipalities. They are public bodies with island councils elected by direct suffrage and a governor, holding responsibilities close to a municipality's and somewhat wider.

The distinction matters for reading any Dutch figure. A statement about the Netherlands and a statement about the Kingdom of the Netherlands describe different territories with different populations, and the record on this site covers the first.