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The anti-racist radical-left party founded by Sylvana Simons in 2016
Part of: Dutch Political Parties
BIJ1 is a small Dutch party of the radical left. It was founded by Sylvana Simons in December 2016 under the name Artikel 1, after her break with DENK. In 2017 the party changed its name to BIJ1.
The reference was deliberate. Article 1 of the Dutch constitution says that everyone in the Netherlands must be treated equally and that discrimination is not permitted. BIJ1 built an entire political identity around that principle.
BIJ1 puts anti-racism, equality, and anti-discrimination at the center of politics more explicitly than any other Dutch party has done in parliament. It is also economically far to the left: anti-capitalist in tone, strongly redistributive, and suspicious of the Dutch habit of treating inequality as a technical problem instead of a power problem.
The party's language is shaped by activism as much as by parliament. Colonial history, structural racism, police discrimination, housing injustice, queer and trans rights, disability, and migration are not side issues for BIJ1. They are the point.
BIJ1 describes itself through two pillars: radical equality and economic justice. In practice that means anti-racism, feminism, queer rights, disability politics, and redistribution are treated as one political project rather than separate issues. On concrete Dutch debates, BIJ1 has pushed for a ban on Zwarte Piet, a national holiday for Keti Koti, formal apologies for slavery and colonialism, and the replacement of the monarchy with a republic. On foreign policy, it sits further left than almost any Dutch parliamentary party: strongly pro-Palestinian, anti-NATO, anti-nuclear, and supportive of reparations to former colonies.
BIJ1 has always been much more important culturally than electorally. The party never became large, but it did something unusual in Dutch politics: it forced issues like colonial memory, anti-Black racism, white innocence, and structural exclusion into a parliamentary register that older left parties often handled more cautiously.
That made BIJ1 polarising. Supporters saw the party as one of the few places where Dutch racism was named directly rather than politely blurred. Critics saw it as moralistic, activist, internally chaotic, or too online. Both reactions tell you something real about Dutch discomfort around race and belonging.
The party entered the Amsterdam council in 2018 and the Tweede Kamer in 2021, when Simons won BIJ1 its first and only parliamentary seat. That breakthrough mattered symbolically: a party built around anti-racism had made it into national parliament.
But BIJ1 also struggled with internal conflict and organisational weakness. Those problems repeatedly overshadowed its message. In 2023 Simons announced that she would not return as lijsttrekker, citing health reasons and conflict inside the party. BIJ1 then lost its seat in the election of November 22, 2023.
As of June 7, 2026, BIJ1 is not a parliamentary force. It has no seat in the Tweede Kamer, Eerste Kamer, or European Parliament.
But it is still relevant as a reference point. If you want to understand how anti-racist and decolonial politics entered Dutch mainstream debate, BIJ1 is part of that story whether you like the party or not. Its importance is less about governing power than about changing which subjects could be argued about in public without euphemism.
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