The party built for migrant and Muslim voters after a PvdA integration row — steady at 3 seats since 2021
Part of: Dutch Political Parties
DENK ("think", also read as an acronym-like pun on gelijkheid — equality) was founded on 9 February 2015 by Tunahan Kuzu and Selçuk Öztürk, two Turkish-Dutch MPs who quit PvdA (Labour) after then-deputy PM Lodewijk Asscher proposed monitoring Turkish-Islamist organisations over concerns about interference in Muslim integration — a plan partly triggered by a later-discredited report claiming 90% of young Turkish-Dutch people sympathised with ISIS. Kuzu and Öztürk saw that as their own party turning on the community it was supposed to represent, and left to build something explicitly for it.
DENK describes itself as social-democratic, but its actual identity is narrower and more specific: a party for the Netherlands' migrant and Muslim communities, built around anti-discrimination, structural-racism, and inclusive-multiculturalism arguments, combined with socially conservative positions on issues like LGBT rights and euthanasia that put it out of step with the rest of the Dutch left. (Wikipedia)
DENK's voter base is concentrated among Turkish-Dutch and Moroccan-Dutch communities, heavily urban — Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and other cities with large migrant populations, where the party has pulled 30–40% of the vote in some majority-minority neighbourhoods. Outside those communities it barely registers. It is one of the clearest examples in Dutch politics of a party built on ethnic and religious identity rather than the usual left–right economic axis.
DENK has held 3 seats in the Tweede Kamer through the 2021, 2023, and 2025 elections — small but remarkably stable. Stephan van Baarle has led the party since August 2023, after taking over from Farid Azarkan. (Tweede Kamer)
DENK has been dogged for years by accusations of closeness to Turkey's ruling AKP and to Erdoğan personally. It was the only Dutch party that declined to call for the release of a Turkish-Dutch blogger arrested over a tweet critical of Erdoğan, and the only party to vote against a 2018 parliamentary motion recognising the Armenian genocide, citing insufficient historical consensus — a position widely read in the Netherlands as deference to Ankara's official line. (Wikipedia)
The party also went through a bruising internal crisis in 2020: founder Kuzu resigned amid allegations of an affair and workplace misconduct, followed by a public power struggle with co-founder Öztürk before the two briefly reconciled. Öztürk later left the party chairmanship for good.
DENK is a useful data point for readers from Turkey, Morocco, and other Muslim-majority countries trying to understand Dutch identity politics: it shows both that explicitly migrant-representation politics has a real, durable seat in the Tweede Kamer, and that Dutch political and media culture treats a party seen as too closely tied to a foreign government (Turkey) with the same suspicion it applies to nationalist parties tied to other blocs — sovereignty and foreign-influence anxiety cut in more than one ideological direction here. For the wider debate DENK sits inside, see Allochtoon and Gastarbeiders.
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