The Left in Europe - Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung

education: most SP voters are people with lower secondary education
(Spier 2008: 112).
Members
Exact data on membership structure, on the other hand, are hard to come
by, since no academic studies have yet been carried out, and inner-party
information is not made freely available to outsiders. Since the second legislative
period, however, the membership structure has changed to the extent
that the proportion of university graduates has increased. This development
mainly concerns the office-holders in Parliament, Senate and National
Executive. (Kagie 2006: 143, 136) Once the party had a larger number
of seats in both chambers the number of those who did not have to work
their way up through the entire party organization from the local to the parliamentary
level naturally grew.
The SP includes in its ranks Trotskyites, social-reformer Christians,
creative artists and former members of the CPN, GroenLinks and PvdA (cf.
Zonneveld 2007) as well as activists from social movements, such as the
peace, antimilitarist, anti-nuclear, environmental and anti-globalization
movements. Its social-ethical humanism has found a programmatic and
practical expression in the person of the theological maverick and SP member
Huub Oosterhuis, a prominent intellectual pioneer of Christian socialism
in The Netherlands: The introduction to the book “Socialisme – What’s
left?” (2004), which contains fragments of the Communist Manifesto and
other economic and philosophical works, was written by Oosterhuis under
the heading: “The Revolution of the Bible” (cf. Oosterhuis 2004: 9 ff.).
Key theses
Netherlands
Since the “landslide” the parties to the left of the Social Democracy face
the challenge of a new party being founded. In view of the German experience
it might be worth while to take a closer look at the SP, as both Germany
and The Netherlands have in common the fact that for a long time no
such left-wing party was able to establish itself in either country. In the
Federal Republic the PDS merged in June 2007 with Labour and Social
Justice – The Electoral Alternative (WASG) to form the DIE LINKE
(THE LEFT) party, and this combination of East German “mass party” and
West German ex-Social Democrats and left-wing trade unionists has managed
to get elected to the regional parliaments in four West German federal
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