Mpanzu Bamenga

Panzu "Mpanzu" Bamenga (born 12 July 1985) is a Congolese-born Dutch jurist, human rights activist and politician of the Democrats 66 (D66), who has served as a member of the Dutch House of Representatives since 2023. He previously held a seat in the municipal council of Eindhoven from 2014 to 2018, and from 2021 to 2022.

Biography Bamenga was born in Kinshasa, Zaire (present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo). In 1994, at the age of 8, he fled to the Netherlands with his mother and brother, where he lived as an undocumented refugee for thirteen years. He completed his pre-vocational secondary education at the Christiaan Huygens College in Eindhoven and subsequently followed an administrative-legal training secondary vocational education at the Summa College from 2001 to 2005. Bamenga subsequently obtained his bachelor's degree in law at the Avans-Fontys Law School in Tilburg University and studied European immigration and asylum law at the Université libre de Bruxelles and Dutch law at the Radboud University. In 2007, he was granted a residence permit by Justice Minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin.

On 22 November 2023, he ran in the 2023 general election as the ninth candidate on the D66 list, and was elected into the House of Representatives. Along with Willem Koops (NSC), he introduced a bill in December 2024 to explicitly prohibit racial profiling during fraud detection and criminal investigations. They argued insufficient protection against the practice existed despite the Constitution's discrimination ban and other anti-discrimination legislation.

House committees Committee for the Interior Committee for Kingdom Relations Committee for European Affairs Committee for Foreign Trade and Development Contact group France Committee for Agriculture, Fisheries, Food Security and Nature Committee for Infrastructure and Water Management

Electoral history

+ YearBodyPartyVotesResult.Party seatsIndividual 2017 House of Representatives Democrats 66 35 834 19 2023 House of Representatives Democrats 66 9 4,264 9 2025 House of Representatives Democrats 66 10 9,121 26