The party began to debate its political course: some members (known as the Godebald-group) wanted to continue co-operation with the PvdA. The party congress adopted a resolution stating that the party would not co-operate with these parties in the next cabinet. The fact that the PPR was co-operating with the ARP and KVP, which many members of the party had just left led to considerable upheaval within the party. The PPR supplied two ministers, Harry van Doorn Minister for Culture, Recreation and Social Work, and Boy Trip, Minister without Portfolio for Science and one state secretary, Michel van Hulten, for Transport, Public Works and Water Management. A compromise is found in the progressive Den Uyl cabinet, an extra-parliamentary cabinet composed out of PvdA, D66 and PPR and progressive individuals from the ARP and the KVP, including former Radicals such as Lubbers and Wilhelm de Gaay Fortman. The PAK parties refuse this possibility and want to form a PAK minority cabinet. The only possibility is a centre-left government with the PAK parties and the Christian democratic parties. A continuation of the Biesheuvel cabinet, which fell within one year is excluded. Former ARP-politician Bas de Gaay Fortman led the party in the elections. In the 1972 general election the parties tried again. They had some success in the KVP, which was seeking new allies and a new image, after it had lost the 1967 general election. In May the group became a formal organisation, the Working Group Christian Radicals, which was oriented at making their mother parties more progressive. The group included Wilhelm de Gaay Fortman, prominent ARP politician, his son Bas de Gaay Fortman, Jo Cals, former KVP prime minister, and Ruud Lubbers, member of the KVP and future Prime Minister. In April this group began to meet regularly with dissidents from the KVP in the Hotel Americain, this gave the group the name 'American Group'. In March 1967 a group of 'regret voters' (ARP-members who regretted voting ARP) published an advertisement in the Protestant newspaper Trouw, aimed at the leadership of the ARP: they claimed that the left-wing, so called 'evangelically radical', ideal of the ARP could not be realised in a cabinet with the VVD.
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