He was a Member of the European Parliament (1999–2004)[2] and was chairman of the Labour Party (Dutch: Partij van de Arbeid, PvdA) from December 2005 until April 2007.

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.

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.

Since 2007, Van Hulten has worked in Brussels, first for public affairs firm Burson-Marsteller as managing director for government relations.

From 2011 to 2014 he was managing director of VoteWatch Europe, an organisation that tracks the voting records of the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers.

From 2014 to 2017 Van Hulten was a visiting senior fellow at the European Institute of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

[6] 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.

[7] 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.