The Netherlands has been an independent monarchy since 16 March 1815, and has been governed by members of the House of Orange-Nassau since.

The Kingdom of the Netherlands is a constitutional monarchy. As such, the role and position of the monarch are defined and limited by the constitution of the Netherlands. An obvious consequence of this is that a fairly large portion of the Dutch constitution is devoted to the monarch; all in all, roughly a third of the constitution describes the succession, mechanisms of accession and abdication to the throne, the roles and responsibilities of the monarch and the formalisms of communication between the States-General of the Netherlands and the monarch in the creation of laws.

The constitution refers to the monarch of the Kingdom of the Netherlands as "The King". This is an indication of the role and refers equally to a man or a woman.

The cycle of monarchs is described in the first section of Chapter 2 of the constitution (which is dedicated to the government of the Netherlands).

Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr. (born September 8, 1922), also known as Lyn Marcus, is an American political activist and founder of the LaRouche movement. He has written on economic, scientific, and political topics, as well as on history, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. Journalists and government officials in China, Italy and Russia have credited LaRouche with forecasting that unrestricted financial speculation would cause the late-2000s financial crisis.

LaRouche was a presidential candidate eight times between 1976 to 2004, running once for his own U.S. Labor Party and campaigning seven times for the Democratic Party nomination. He was sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment in 1988 for conspiracy to commit mail fraud and tax code violations, and was released in 1994 on parole. Ramsey Clark, his chief appellate attorney and a former U.S. Attorney General, said that LaRouche was denied a fair trial. The Court of Appeals unanimously rejected the appeal.

Supporters of LaRouche call him a political leader in the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Commentators for The Washington Post and The New York Times have described him as a conspiracy theorist and a political extremist. Some have called him fascist or antisemitic, and a 1979 editorial in the New York Times characterized his movement as a 'cult'.Norman Bailey, formerly with the National Security Council, described LaRouche's staff in 1984 as one of the best private intelligence services in the world, while the Heritage Foundation, a think tank, wrote that he leads "what may well be one of the strangest political groups in American history."