Labour party support hits all-time low; pressure mounts on leader

The PvdA has reached an all-time low in Maurice de Hond's latest poll. If an election was to be held today, the PvdA would only have 9 seats, with only 6 percent of Dutch voters voting for the Labour party. Only 20 percent of the people who voted for the PvdA in 2012 would still vote for the party today. According to De Hond, the low support for the Labour party seems to be linked to the chaos surrounding the personal budget payments and ABN Amro's IPO. The PvdA's continuing loss of support is putting a lot of pressure on party leader Diederik Samsom. After the Labour party's disappointing results in the provincial elections in March, more than half of PvdA voters wanted Samsom to step down. During a PvdA mini-conference to evaluate the election results in April, party members themselves called for new leadership and a new direction In a survey done by Kieskompas to find the most popular politicians in the Netherlands, Samsom scored well below fellow party members. He ended up as the 10th most popular politician in the country, with PvdA members Ahmed Aboutaleb, Eberhard van der Laan, Jeroen Dijsselbloem and Lodewijk Asscher coming in ahead of him. The PvdA's coalition partner VVD also had a bad week in the polls. The Liberal party lost one seat and ended up with 25. If an election was held today, the coalition would only get 34 seats - less than half of the 76 seats needed for a majority in parliament. The opposition is benefiting from the coalition's loss of support. The D66, SP and GroenLinks each gained one seat, leaving them with 18, 23 and 14 seats respectively. GroenLinks is doing remarkably well - the last time the party reached 14 seats in a poll was in February 2010.