People of Netherlands Turn Their Backs on Nation’s Once-Active Communist Party

The Dutch Communist Party has hit a postwar low after more than four decades as a leftist dynamo on the national political scene.

Beset by ideological feuding, financial troubles and a decline in voter appeal, the party lost the only two seats it held in the 150-member Parliament in 1986, marking the first time since World War II that it hasn’t had a parliamentary role.

The fortunes of the Communist daily newspaper De Waarheid (Truth) have paralleled the party’s decline, with half its 12-member editorial staff, including the editor in chief, recently resigning to protest a doctrinal split.

The 70-year-old party’s electoral disaster is part of a West European decline in Communist Party popularity, even in such countries as Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece, where the Communists have been traditionally strong.

“We had forgotten that some traditional communist values are worth retaining and that not all new ideas could replace them,” said Ina Brouwer, the party leader.

“We want to restore the balance between old and new to repair the electoral damage,” she said in an interview.

Until recent years, the Communist Party of the Netherlands was highly influential although its membership remained at about 10,000 for the last decade and it never drew more than 10% of the vote. It gained prestige primarily from the major role its members played in the Dutch Resistance during the 5-year Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in World War II.

De Waarheid was born as an underground newspaper during the war years, and after the Allied victory in 1945, its circulation reached a high of 165,000. It now is down to around 14,500, according to Robert Schurink, the paper’s director.

Despite electoral setbacks following the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian Rebellion in 1956 and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the party always managed to stay in Parliament, supported by a hard core of 3% to 4% of the electorate.

Marcus Bakker, a Stalinist who was its longtime floor leader in Parliament, was popular nationwide in the 1960s and 1970s largely because of his speaking talents and scathing debating style.

But in the general elections of 1986, the party lost its two Parliament seats after campaigning on a platform that assailed the fiscal austerity program of Premier Ruud Lubbers, a Christian Democrat.

“They were deserted by both their traditional voters and the younger generation,” said Paul Fennema, a political scientist at the University of Amsterdam and a longtime authority on the Communist Party.

He added in an interview that the party’s young constituency had defected en masse, apparently disappointed over its inability to change Dutch society on short notice.

The party’s decline has its roots in the mid-1970s, when its pro-Soviet, working-class leadership was challenged by younger, university-educated members.

The upstarts were more interested in issues like the deterioration of the environment, feminism and Third World poverty than in classical communist quests such as the class struggle, according to party leader Brouwer.

When feminism was added to Marxism-Leninism as one of the party’s guiding principles in 1980, the party split between the young, modernist wing and the traditional cadres, who tried to preserve old communist values via a hard-line faction called the Dutch Communist League.

“The league was not presented as an alternative to the party proper but as a protest movement within the party,” Brouwer said. “Nevertheless, the development was seen as a split by the outside world and caused immeasurable harm to the party.”