The bohemian intellectual and social liberal politician Hans van Mierlo, who has died aged 78 after a pro-tracted illness, was one of the most charismatic figures in 20th-century Dutch and European politics. When he burst into the public consciousness in 1966 by launching, with Hans Gruijters, a new party – Democrats 66 (D66) – it was like a blast of fresh air in the stultified atmosphere of the Hague. He offered a new vision and a fresh approach to politics, which led some commentators to describe him as "the Dutch Kennedy". Unlike the former US president John F Kennedy, however, he never achieved the highest public office and indeed, both his career and the fortunes of his party would prove to be something of a rollercoaster ride.
The height of his achievement was to hold the twin posts of foreign minister and deputy prime minister from 1994 until 1998, in a coalition administration under the Labour prime minister Willem "Wim" Kok. But this was also the period that marked what for Hans was the low point of his public life, when in 1995 Dutch peacekeepers failed to prevent the Serb massacre of more than 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina – an act denounced by the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague as genocide.
Born the second of nine children into an affluent, devoutly Roman Catholic banking family in Breda, southern Netherlands, he was christened with the awesomely resonant names Henricus Antonus Franciscus Maria Oliva, a mouthful that was quickly truncated to the nickname "Hafmo", which stuck with him well into adult life, when he adopted the moniker Hans.
He attended three Catholic primary and middle schools before entering the prestigious Saint Canisius College in Nijmegen. After a year of military service in 1951-52, he took up a place at the Catholic University of Nijmegen, although he had just declared himself an atheist, and he spent the rest of that decade reading law.
Hans took advantage of the new freedom to travel that had become available in post-second world war western Europe to get to know France and its culture intimately, even writing occasional columns for a Perpignan newspaper, l'Indépendant. He realised that he was temperamentally far more suited to the world of letters than he was to the law courts, so on graduation he joined the Algemeen Handelsblad newspaper in Amsterdam. At the same time, he became involved in various cultural activities. A holder of the Thorbecke prize for elocution, he chaired a televised Dutch-language dictation competition and sat on various cultural boards, culminating in his chairmanship of the Netherlands Ballet Orchestra in 1999. He wrote a number of stories and a book, The Citizen and Politics (1992).
Hans was drawn into politics largely out of frustration at what he saw as the inadequacies of the traditional Dutch parties in the turbulent mid-1960s, when the Provos counter-culture movement was at its height. The D66 was initially not so much a party as a movement without clear policies, which nonetheless inspired many people, the young in particular. This led to Hans and six colleagues being elected to the House of Representatives in 1967.
The hoped-for breakthrough to become a senior party in government never quite happened, however. When not in opposition, D66 would be condemned to be a minor party in various coalition combinations, its reputation often suffering as a result. When forced to choose which party to back on the first such occasion, Hans unwisely declared: "If I had a gun at my chest, I'd opt for Labour." The party did indeed opt for Labour, but ditched Hans as its leader, though less than a decade later he was back in that position. In 1981 he had a short term as defence minister in a grand coalition of traditional parties, which he referred to as disastrous. The anti-establishment D66 appeared to have become part of the establishment, to the dismay of many of its voters.
Undeterred by political setbacks, Hans nurtured D66 through to a second flowering in the 1990s. As foreign minister, he often attracted attention, for example causing a diplomatic rift with Turkey by allowing a gathering of the Kurdish parliament in exile to take place in 1995. That year, he also infuriated the Chinese by highlighting human rights while on an official visit to Beijing. Human rights, the power of the individual, equality and a passionate belief in the European project were all central to his political philosophy. When the Netherlands held the EU presidency in the first half of 1997, he insisted to the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat on the need to combat terrorism in return for economic aid.
Hans retired from active politics in 1998, being granted the honorific title of minister of state, but he was delighted to be appointed a Dutch government representative to the EU convention charged with the task of drawing up the ill-fated European constitution in 2002. He accepted the challenge, despite the fact that, two years earlier, he had had a liver transplant, made necessary because he had contracted hepatitis C from an infected blood transfusion many years before.
Hans married three times and was twice divorced. He had a son with his first wife, Anna Los, and two daughters with his second wife, Olla van Maasdijk. He spent his last decade with a partner 24 years his junior, the novelist Aldegonda "Connie" Palmen, marrying her last November, by which time it was clear that the end was near. She and his children survive him.
• Henricus Antonus Franciscus Maria Oliva "Hans" van Mierlo, politician, born 18 August 1931; died 11 March 2010
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