Communist Partij van Nederland
The Communist Partij van Nederland (CPN; pronounced [kɔmynɪstisə pɑrtɛi van nedərlɑnt] , German: Communist Party of the Netherlands ) was a communist party in the Netherlands . It was founded in 1909 as the Sociaal-Democratische Partij , joined the Communist International in 1919 as the Communist Partij van Holland and went from 1989 to 1991 in the new GroenLinks party .
From 1918 until the 1986 election, the CPN was continuously represented in the Second Chamber . However, she never got into government.
From the foundation in 1909 to the Second World War
The SDP was formed in 1909 as an orthodox-Marxist split from the Sociaal-Democratische Arbeiderspartij in a dispute over a magazine called Tribune , which the party leadership had demanded to be discontinued. This makes the Netherlands the first country besides Russia where the split between revisionists (moderates) and orthodox Marxists (radicals) took place before the First World War.
In 1919, the SDP joined the Communist International of Lenin and named in Communistische Partij van Holland to; it was not until 1935 that Holland changed it to Nederland . In the 1920s, the party came under increasing Soviet influence. Since 1928 it followed the line that social democracy and fascism were to be equated, but in 1935 it adopted the popular front strategy, according to which an alliance with the social democrats should be sought against the fascists. This strategy ended in 1939 with the Hitler-Stalin Pact ; even after the German attack in May 1940, the communists fought against social democracy. However, resistance to National Socialism came first.
Prohibition and underground activities
Immediately after the occupation began, the Germans banned all communist parties, a step that the leadership of the CPN had foreseen at an early stage. From then on, the party was the first Dutch underground resistance organization to operate. The most notable action in the early phase of the occupation was the triggering of the Amsterdam February strike of 1941, which the CPN claimed for itself. As a result of the German attack on the Soviet Union in June of the same year, the CPN tried to get closer to other, mostly social-democratic resistance groups. In 1943, shortly before the outbreak of the April-May strike , she joined the so-called Raad van Verzet (Council of Resistance), which fought against the Germans more actively and more violently than in the past.
Post-war period and crisis 1977
In the first elections after World War II, in 1946, the CPN received ten seats out of a hundred. The image as a resistance party contributed to this success. Relations with the Social Democrats were bad because of the Indonesian question , among other things. During the Cold War, the CPN was isolated because of its clearly positive attitude towards the Soviet Union. The Hungarian uprising of 1956, after which many Hungarians fled to the Netherlands after its suppression, made the CPN extraordinarily unpopular. In 1959 she only won three of 150 seats in parliament. Although it condemned the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union in 1969, it then sought rapprochement again. In 1977 a delegation in Moscow concluded that the CPN agreed on major points with the Soviet Union. Despite the intermittent rise in election results, the party only got two seats in 1977.
Since 1938 Paul de Groot had been General Secretary of the CPN, who intensified centralist development and glorified Stalin. In 1970 he still criticized the so - called de - Stalinization by Khrushchev as revisionism. In 1968 he became honorary chairman. He interpreted the loss of seats in 1977 as a result of the passivity of the party leadership at the time and revisionist influences, the squint for credibility among bourgeois circles. For the first time in post-war history, the party leadership refused to follow de Groot and, contrary to his demands, did not resign. In 1978 the party congress took his honorary chairmanship from him.
Final phase and dissolution in 1990
As a result, the party became more moderate and condemned, for example, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. In the local council elections in 1982, the communists even entered into lists with the Social Democrats. In 1984 the party abandoned Leninism and accepted Marxism and feminism as equal sources of inspiration. But in 1986 she lost her last three seats in parliament, in 1989 she only took part in the election via the GroenLinks (Green-Left) list shared with three other small parties . In 1990 she had to give up her party newspaper De Waarheid , and in the same year GroenLinks became a new party in which the CPN was absorbed.
The party had its strongholds mainly in the west of the Netherlands, but also in the northeastern province of Groningen. Supporters who were dissatisfied with the 1990 merger founded a successor party to the CPN, the Nieuwe Communist Partij - NCPN , in 1992 .
CPN election results ( Tweede Kamer )
- 1918: 2.31%
- 1922: 1.83%
- 1925: 1.19%
- 1929: 2.00%
- 1933: 3.18%
- 1937: 3.35%
- 1946: 10.56%
- 1948: 7.74%
- 1952: 6.16%
- 1956: 4.75%
- 1959: 2.41%
- 1963: 2.77%
- 1967: 3.61%
- 1971: 3.90%
- 1972: 4.47%
- 1977: 1.73%
- 1981: 2.05%
- 1982: 1.79%
- 1986: 0.63%
Membership numbers
| year | Members | year | Members |
| 1946 | 50,000 | 1970 | ? |
| 1947 | 53,000 | 1971 | ? |
| 1948 | 53,000 | 1972 | ? |
| 1949 | 34,000 | 1973 | 10.147 |
| 1950 | 27,392 | 1974 | ? |
| 1951 | ? | 1975 | ? |
| 1952 | ? | 1976 | 11,550 |
| 1953 | 17,000 | 1977 | 13,082 |
| 1954 | ? | 1978 | 15,298 |
| 1955 | 15,463 | 1979 | 14,979 |
| 1956 | ? | 1980 | 15,510 |
| 1957 | 12,858 | 1981 | 15,014 |
| 1958 | 12,317 | 1982 | 14,370 |
| 1959 | 11,262 | 1983 | 13,868 |
| 1960 | ? | 1984 | 11,594 |
| 1961 | ? | 1985 | 9000 |
| 1962 | ? | 1986 | 8500 |
| 1963 | ? | 1987 | 7000 |
| 1964 | ? | 1988 | 6500 |
| 1965 | ? | 1989 | 6500 |
| 1966 | ? | 1990 | 5700 |
| 1967 | ? | 1991 | 3416 |
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Jan van Putten: Politieke stromingen , 4th edition, Het Spectrum: Utrecht 1995 (1985), p. 293.
- ^ Jan van Putten: Politieke stromingen , 4th edition, Het Spectrum: Utrecht 1995 (1985), pp. 293/294.
- ^ Friso Wielinga: The Netherlands. Politics and Political Culture in the 20th Century . Waxmann, Münster 2008, ISBN 978-3-8309-1844-8 , pp. 229/230 .
- ^ Jan van Putten: Politieke stromingen , 4th edition, Het Spectrum: Utrecht 1995 (1985), pp. 294/295.
- ^ Jan van Putten: Politieke stromingen , 4th edition, Het Spectrum: Utrecht 1995 (1985), pp. 294/296.
- ↑ Jan van Putten: Politieke stromingen , 4th edition, Het Spectrum: Utrecht 1995 (1985), p. 296.
- ^ DNPP: membership numbers of the CPN .