Reaching the European Parliament Van Hulten began his career in 1993 as a policy officer at the Dutch Trades Union Confederation (, FNV) in Amsterdam. He was then successively private secretary (political advisor) to Education and Science Minister
Jo Ritzen and administrator in the Secretariat of the EU Council of Ministers, where he worked first on internal market issues and then on EU enlargement. In 1997, Van Hulten took part in the election campaign for
Tony Blair in the UK, and in 1998 he worked for the
Labour Party campaign in the parliamentary elections in the Netherlands, as speechwriter for party leader Wim Kok. In 1999, Van Hulten was a successful Labour Party candidate in the
European Parliament elections. He was a member of the
Committee on Budgetary Control, which is tasked with reducing EU budgetary fraud and irregularities. Together with colleagues from other countries and parties he founded the
Campaign for Parliament Reform, 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. ==References==