Michiel van Hulten

Michiel Frans van Hulten (born 18 February 1969) is a director of strategic research. He is a former director of Transparency International EU and a former Dutch politician. He was a Member of the European Parliament (1999–2004) a group of MEPs which campaigned for an end the monthly 'travelling circus' of Parliament between Brussels and Strasbourg and greater accountability for the reimbursements of parliamentary expenses. In 2002, Van Hulten was named one the Europeans of the Year by the weekly newspaper European Voice.

Party chairman He decided not to seek re-election in 2004 and joined the board of Policy Network, an international progressive think-tank based in London. From 2004 to 2005, he was executive vice-chair of Policy Network. After PvdA chairman Ruud Koole announced in 2005, he was stepping down, Van Hulten ran for the chairmanship of the Labour Party and won with over 60% of the vote.

Van Hulten was campaign chairman for the Labour Party in the successful local elections in 2006 as well as in the parliamentary elections of 2006, when the Labour Party unexpectedly lost 9 seats. In the months following the elections, he was sometimes criticised for his idiosyncratic style. After Van Hulten presented a set of reform proposals to the party executive in April 2007, three board members informed him via a letter that they disagreed with his views. Van Hulten saw this as a breach of trust and resigned with immediate effect on 25 April 2007. The same evening, the rest of the board also resigned, and an interim board was appointed under the leadership of Van Hultens predecessor Ruud Koole.

After electoral politics From 2007 to 2012, van Hulten was a founding Member of the European Council on Foreign Relations. Since 2007, Van Hulten has worked in Brussels, first for public affairs firm Burson-Marsteller as managing director for government relations. Since 2010, he has been an independent consultant in the field of European Union democracy, transparency and accountability. From 2013 to 2019, he was a supervisory board member at Defend Democracy, an independent, nonpartisan and transatlantic organisation whose mission is to defend and strengthen liberal democracy against internal, external and technological threats.

In 2023, Van Hulten was part of the Centre for European Policy Studies/Heinrich Böll Foundation High-Level Group on Bolstering EU Democracy, chaired by Kalypso Nicolaïdis. That same year, he took a one-year sabbatical to pursue a postgraduate certificate in international investigative journalism at Thomas More University of Applied Sciences in Mechelen, Belgium. He left Transparency International EU in July 2024 and now works as an analyst, writer, teacher and consultant. In June 2024, he joined the Board of the media literacy NGO Lie Detectors.

In 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020, Van Hulten was named one of the top 40 EU influencers on Twitter.