Frans Timmermans, leader of the left-wing alliance of GroenLinks and Labour (PvdA), has said he wants to establish a new left-wing party by the end of the year.

Timmermans backed a call by PvdA MP Habtamu de Hoop at a recent party meeting to create a single party with its own narrative rather than merge the two existing factions.

“I’m very impatient,” Timmermans told Nieuwsuur. “We have to make progress as fast as possible.”

“This country is all at sea thanks to four coalition parties who are making a mess of it. I want to create an alternative. It’s time to make a start.”

GroenLinks-PvdA ran a joint list of candidates at the general election in 2023 and at last year’s European elections, even though the two parties belong to different different “families” in the European parliament.

Despite winning eight more seats at the last election than they managed as separate parties in 2021, GL-PvdA were eclipsed by Geert Wilders’s far-right PVV and only finished just ahead of the right-wing liberal VVD.

Stuck in the polls

Since then the party has barely shifted in the opinion polls despite waning support for the four coalition parties. Voters have been more inclined to switch to the centre-right Christian Democrats (CDA) or the progressive-liberal D66.

GL-PvdA has also had to deal with disagreements between the two party bases on issues such as the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, where older PvdA members are more likely to support Israel while GroenLinks members tend to sympathise with the Palestinians.

De Hoop set out his ideas for a new party based on “idealistic social democracy” when he delivered the Herman Höften lecture in Almelo to party activists at the end of January.

“When I look around I see a new generation in our party that really wants to see the social democratic movement daring to dream again,” he said. “To stand up against the suffocating sobriety and cynicism, precisely because they can see what state the world is in.”

Timmermans said 90% of local GroenLinks and PvdA party groups had already agreed to run joint lists in next year’s council elections and the parties would continue to form a joint block in parliament.

Point of no return

“We’ve reached the point of no return,” he said. “And I hope that that association will give rise to a new movement that both parties feel at home in.”

Timmermans dismissed calls by some senior PvdA members to break the alliance, arguing that the political landscape had changed permanently since the assassination of Pim Fortuyn in 2001 and the subsequent rise of parties such as Geert Wilders’s PVV.

“There are still feelings of guilt in that group about the lost working classes that went to Fortuyn,” De Hoop said, while Timmermans added: “We should leave the nostalgic dreaming to the right.”