General election in Holland – Campaign posters

Campaign posters. You can gain brownie points in a party by sticking these posters on the poster boards. Some people like to deface the posters, as you can see here, with beards drawn on some of the leaders.

After the long election campaign the right-wing parties moved from 74 seats to 78 seats in the 150-seat parliament. The left-wing parties lost two seats and went from 76 to 72.

The Dutch Prime Minister Balkenende has resigned as party leader.

The christian parties had a majority in parliament from 1918 to 1967. They dropped to 30% of the seats in 1994, but now they are below 20% of the seats (28 out of 150).

In the 1970s somebody described Dutch politics as follows:
There is a socialist party which wants to increase the top rate of tax to 80%, there is a right-wing party which wants to decrease the top rate of tax to 78% and there is a party which is against the French Revolution.

Not much has changed since then: the party which was against the French Revolution (the Anti Revolution Party) is now part of the Christian Democrats. The top rate of tax is slightly different, the socialists want to increase to 60%, the right-wing party wants to keep it at 52%.