Dutch marijuana policies are not expected to change following this week’s parliamentary elections. Actually, Dutch cannabis policies are a bit of a muddle as the result of foreign pressure, but if anything changes it is likely to be for the better. The Labor Party was actually committed to legalization of cannabis before the last election, but caved in to foreign pressure, especially from France and Germany.

With rabidly prohibitionist French President Chirac’s party having lost control of parliament to the timidly anti-prohibitionist Socialists, the key event to watch for next is the September election in Germany. If the Social Democrats win, as presently anticipated, this could take even more pressure off the Dutch.

In Holland, with a dozen different parties representing every imaginable view, no party has had a majority in the Dutch lower house in eighty years, and that did not change in this election. However, in a somewhat surprising turn of events, the dominant Dutch Labor party substantially increased its seats in the Parliament in Wednesday’s elections. A month ago the Swedish prohibitionist organization Hassela was predicting that the more prohibitionist Christian Democrats would be returned to power because of concerns about "law and order." This did not happen, and they are yet to report the election results.

Helped by a strong economy, Prime Minister Wim Kok's center-left ruling Labor Party and the right-leaning Liberal Party both won new seats in parliament's 150-seat lower house. The Labor Party won eight new seats to raise its total to 45. The gain was especially significant for Kok since his party's seats have dwindled in the past few elections despite remaining the biggest power in parliament. The Liberals gained seven seats, taking their voting bloc to 38 seats.

The ruling coalition will now have 98 seats, up from its current total of 92 seats. On the other hand, the country's extreme-right Nationalists Party, which won three seats in parliament in the last elections in 1994 with an anti-foreigner platform, was projected to retain just one seat. Turn out was around eighty percent of the 11 million registered voters, in contrast to the US where less than half of those eligible vote.

On Thursday the rival political leaders began the arduous post-election process of hammering out a new coalition government that will probably differ little from the current one. As part of the coalition formation protocol, party leaders met Thursday with Queen Beatrix to brief the monarch on election results and plans for the next government. But it appears the new government will look similar to the current coalition between Labor and the Liberals.  A key question remained whether the junior coalition partner, Democrats 66,-- which lost 10 of its 24 seats-- would share the leadership for a second term.