GroenLinks (, ) is a green political party in the Netherlands.
It was formed on 1 March 1989 from the merger of four left-wing parties: the Communist Party of the Netherlands, the Pacifist Socialist Party, the Political Party of Radicals and the Evangelical People's Party, which shared left-wing and progressive ideals and earlier co-operated in Regenboog-coalition for the 1989 European Parliament election. After disappointing results in the 1989 and 1994 general elections, the nascent party fared particularly well in the 1998 and 2002 elections. The party's leader at that time, Paul Rosenmöller, was seen as the unofficial Leader of the Opposition against the First Kok cabinet, a purple government. The party's number of seats fell from 10 to 4 seats in the 2012 election, before increasing to 14 in 2017 and falling to 8 in 2021. A merger with the Labour Party is currently under discussion.
GroenLinks describes itself as "green", "social" and "tolerant". The party's voters are concentrated in larger cities, especially those with a university education.
History
Before 1989: predecessors
GroenLinks was founded in 1989 as a merger of four parties that were to the left of the Labour Party (PvdA), a social-democratic party which has traditionally been the largest centre-left party in the Netherlands. The founding parties were the (formerly-communist) Communist Party of the Netherlands (CPN), the Pacifist Socialist Party (PSP), which originated in the peace movement, the green-influenced Political Party of Radicals (PPR), originally a progressive Christian party, and the progressive Christian Evangelical People's Party. These four parties were frequently classified as "small left"; to indicate their marginal existence. In the 1972 general election these parties won sixteen seats (out of 150), in the 1977 general election they only won six. From that moment on, members and voters began to argue for close cooperation.
From the 1980s onwards the four parties started to cooperate in municipal and provincial elections. As fewer seats are available in these representations, a higher percentage of votes is required to gain a seat. In the 1984 European election, the PPR, CPN and PSP formed the Green Progressive Accord that entered as one into the European elections. They gained one seat, which rotated between the PSP and PPR. Party-members of the four parties also encountered each other in grassroots extraparliamentary protest against nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. More than 80% of the members of the PSP, CPN and PPR attended at least one of the two mass protests against the placement of nuclear weapons, which took place in 1981 and 1983.
The Evangelical People's Party was a relatively new party, founded in 1981, as a splinter group from the Christian Democratic Appeal, the largest party of the Dutch centre-right. During its period in parliament, 1982–1986, it had trouble positioning itself between the small left parties (PSP, PPR and CPN), the PvdA and the CDA.
The increasingly close cooperation between PPR, PSP, CPN and EVP, and the ideological change that accompanied it was not without internal dissent within the parties. The ideological change that CPN made from official communism to 'reformism' led to a split in the CPN; and the subsequent founding of the League of Communists in the Netherlands in 1982. In 1983, a group of "deep" Greens split from the PPR to found The Greens. The CPN and the PPR wanted to form an electoral alliance with the PSP for the 1986 elections. This led to a crisis within the PSP, in which chair of the parliamentary party (Fractievoorzitter) Fred van der Spek, who opposed cooperation, was replaced by Andrée van Es, who favoured cooperation. Van der Spek left the PSP to found his own Party for Socialism and Disarmament. The 1986 PSP congress, however, rejected the electoral alliance.