Dutch politics has a habit of naming its worst nights after the man who caused them. The most famous of all happened a short walk from here, in the small hours of the fourteenth of October 1966.
The annual budget debate had been running for days. The cabinet led by Jo Cals was short of money for the coming year, and the man asking the sharpest questions about it was Norbert Schmelzer, leader of the parliamentary group of the Catholic party. That detail matters, because Cals was a Catholic party man too. They sat in the same church, so to speak, and on paper they were on the same side.
At twenty to four in the morning Schmelzer tabled a motion demanding sounder funding for the budget. Cals read it as a vote of no confidence. At ten past four the prime minister walked back into the chamber with his entire cabinet behind him, which told everyone present how the evening would end. The motion passed by seventy five votes to sixty two. Most of the Catholic group voted with Schmelzer, against their own prime minister.
The cabinet resigned the following day. Dutch politics turned sharper and more polarised afterwards, and a young party founded that same spring, D66, suddenly had the wind behind it.
Sixty years on, people still say the night of Schmelzer and nobody asks which night.
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