The Labour party (PvdA) needs a clear, strong leader and serious discussion about its direction, elder statesman Jan Pronk said on Monday.

The former minister was speaking about the PvdA’s poor showing in the EU parliamentary elections, in which it lost four of its seven seats.
While current party leader Wouter Bos is a good minister of finance and a good manager ‘he was not the leader of the Labour party over the past few weeks,’ Pronk told news agency ANP.
‘A strong leader is what gets people to the ballot box,’ he said. French president Nicolas Sarkozy and Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel were examples of strong leaders, he said.