After two years plagued by infighting and political paralysis, the Dutch tried to turn a page in Wednesday’s seismic election.
But the country remains sharply divided: The parties finishing first and second, centrist liberal D66 and the far-right Party for Freedom (PVV), are sworn enemies.
During his campaign, D66 leader Rob Jetten cast himself as a foil to PVV firebrand Geert Wilders. And Wilders has said he “basically disagrees with everything [Jetten] says.”
Dutch convention has it that the largest party gets first shot at forming a coalition and its leader is favored to become prime minister. That looks like Jetten right now, especially as no one mainstream wants to team up with Wilders. But if talks fail, others can try — meaning the coming weeks remain unpredictable.
Once the Heineken wears off, parties will have to decide who they’re willing to work in coalition with, to unravel the country’s complex issues of housing and nitrogen-pollution crises mixed with simmering anti-immigrant sentiment.
But that’s for another day. For now, here are election night’s biggest winners and losers.
Winners
Rob Jetten
Meet your potential next Dutch prime minister.
“We did it!” a victorious Jetten, the 38-year-old D66 leader, told a boisterous crowd in Leiden chanting the party’s campaign slogan: “It is possible.”
The party picked the line to underscore its optimistic campaign promises on housing and education, but the mantra applied also to its result: With a preliminary forecast predicting 26 seats, D66 is on track to achieve its best result ever and become the Netherlands’ largest party after a stunning late surge.
To illustrate its reversal of fortunes: In the 2023 election, D66 won just nine seats, 17 fewer than on Wednesday.
Addressing journalists on election night, Jetten said the results were nothing short of historic, “because we’ve shown not only to the Netherlands but also to the world that it’s possible to beat populist and extreme-right movements.”
Fiscally conservative liberals
At the start of election night, a visitor attending the election watch party of the center-right liberals of the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) joked that they’d gone ahead and “sent out the funeral bouquets.”
The party had been shedding support in the polls, with the gloomiest projections predicting that it could lose 10 seats compared with its 2023 results, which were already down from 2021.
That didn’t happen: According to a preliminary forecast, the party would lose just two seats, finish third in the race and actually emerge from the election as the least-damaged party from the outgoing, right-leaning government.
A triumph indeed.
“Decent” politics
After two years of constant backbiting and a political circus traversing from one scandal to the next, a core of Dutch voters returned to a politics of familiar ideas and the promise of stability.
The main proponent of this, Christian Democrat boss Henri Bontenbal, enthusiastically summarized it in The Hague on Wednesday night: “The Netherlands is gasping for new politics. Respectful and on-topic,” after campaigning with the slogan, “a decent country.”
Speaking to POLITICO, Bontenbal admitted that the election came at the right time for his party, as it bounced back from five seats in 2023 to 18 this week on that platform, according to the preliminary forecast.
“I really think people are tired of all the old political games that got us here,” he exhaled.
Bontenbal’s CDA wasn’t the only party scoring big with a positive campaign tone — Jetten’s efforts also paid off in spades — which broke through grumpiness characterizing the Dutch political scene after the Wilders-dominated government fell in June.
Losers
Frans Timmermans
Frans Timmermans left his top job at the European Commission in the summer of 2023 to become the face of the Dutch left and to lead a joint green-socialist ticket to victory.
On Wednesday, he failed for the second time.
Timmermans was unable to cash in on a year of chaos under a right-wing government. His party still loved him, as supporters made clear even during his concession speech — but Timmermans realized the Netherlands does not.
The GreenLeft-Labor ticket lost seats compared to the 2023 election, and fell short of poll predictions after a campaign in which it had seemed to emerge as the lead progressive antagonist to the far-right PVV.
But the spell broke on Wednesday, and the green-socialist audience in Rotterdam had to face up to the reality that D66’s Jetten is now the Dutch progressive darling.
Timmermans, after the devastating exit poll, wasted no time in quitting as the alliance leader.
The left
Can anything propel left-wing parties to victory — or, frankly, even to gain seats — in the Dutch political landscape?
It’s a tough question for Dutch left-wingers to wrestle with Thursday morning, because the top left-leaning parties — the GreenLeft-Labor alliance and the Socialist Party (SP) — lost ground, according to projections.
The biggest opposition party couldn’t convince voters to back them, and even lost seats, despite being faced with the hardest-right government in Dutch history and the political chaos it ushered in.
The SP fared even worse than Timmermans’ joint ticket; its seat count almost halved, from five to three.
GreenLeft-Labor is already an alliance of two left-wing parties, and both have decided to merge into one single party next year — but they face a rocky road ahead, though could make up part of a Jetten-led coalition.
Jury’s out
Geert Wilders
We’ll never know how Geert Wilders or his supporters reacted to the first exit polls, since, unlike its competitors, the PVV didn’t hold an election watch party.
When he did eventually face the press, fiery Wilders was the picture of humility, describing the dramatic loss of 11 seats — more than any other party — as a “heavy setback.”
But, careful now, don’t declare him politically finished just yet.
After triggering the collapse of the previous government, Wilders risked being ditched by his voters in even larger numbers. A sweeping victory by his left-wing nemesis Timmermans would have added to the humiliation.
Neither scenario played out. Instead it was Timmermans who stepped down, while Wilders remains near the top of the political leaderboard.
And although his chances of joining even a right-wing coalition are slim — he’s burned too many bridges for that — he seems primed to return to his role of Dutch politics’ longest-serving outsider, firing shots and tossing bombs at the establishment from the benches of parliament.
“Buckle up, we’re only getting started,” he warned reporters.
