14% this time), he will retire from the leadership. He will remain in the House of Representatives. Former party leader Hans Wiegel, who had hinted at returning to lead the party in the next general election announced he would not seek a return to politics. A likely candidate to succeed van Aartsen as political leader is Mark Rutte, the current staatssecretaris for higher education and science. He is seen as a representative for the more left-wing ('social liberal') side of VDD (although he himself denies this), illustrated by the fact that he does not wear a necktie, which, he says, illustrates that the VVD is for all people, not just an elite group. For CDA an important part of the campaign was that regional and national politics are two separate things. For this reason, premier Balkenende did not participate (much) in the campaign and declared after the elections that the CDA would not change its national policy. D66 fractievoorzitter Lousewies van der Laan remarked that this was the tenth election in a row (over 12 years) that D66 lost seats and that this time they would not seek the cause in external factors but within the party itself. People no longer know what D66 stands for. An example was the wavering stance of D66 on the Afghanistan mission debates in December and January, first opposing it and then going along with it. Coalitions There used to be a time limit to the duration of coalition talks, but that has been dropped, so the formations may take a long time. The combination of the three left wing parties PvdA, GroenLinks and SP that already formed a coalition in Nijmegen (which was consequently nicknamed Havana on the Waal) has gained a majority in at least 39 municipalities, mostly in the Northeast and the Randstad, including 7 of the 12 largest municipalities and 20 of the 60 municipalities with an electorate over 50.000, including Maastricht and Heerlen, the two biggest cities in CDA stronghold province Limburg. However, although this combination is close to 50% of the seats in many municipalities where all three participated, a majority is in most cases only just not possible or too narrow to be comfortable. The biggest majority was in the small Groningen municipality of Pekela (11 out of 15 seats), but also in major cities like Amsterdam (33 out of 45), Nijmegen (24 out of 39), Utrecht