Don’t expect a new Dutch government in time for the festive season, caretaker Prime Minister Dick Schoof said Friday.
“I think I’ll still be prime minister by Christmas,” Schoof noted on his way into a Cabinet meeting. He said it will be “quite complicated” to form a new coalition, and that he’d be “surprised” if it were done before decorations go up.
Centrist liberal Rob Jetten’s D66 party was announced as the winner of Wednesday’s election by the Dutch national press agency ANP on Friday, but now the hard work of forming a government begins.
Both D66 and Geert Wilders’ far-right Party for Freedom (PVV) won 26 seats in the Netherlands’ 150-strong parliament, according to nearly complete results; while the conservative-liberal People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) won 22, the left-wing GreenLeft-Labor (GL-PvdA) alliance got 20 and the center-right Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA) snagged 18.
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The largest party typically gets the right to try to assemble a governing coalition first. Jetten’s D66 is slightly ahead of Wilders’ PVV with a margin of just 15,000 votes, with 99.7 percent counted nationally, and ANP said Friday that D66 could no longer be caught for first place. Jetten is, therefore, the clear favorite to become the new prime minister.
But VVD leader Dilan Yeşilgöz also repeatedly ruled out governing with GreenLeft-Labor in the run-up to the election, potentially complicating D66-led negotiations. With 26 seats, D66 would be an exceptionally small largest party in the government, and without GreenLeft-Labor, a future coalition would require five parties to reach a majority.
That doesn’t have to be a problem, however, Schoof said, looking across the border for inspiration.
“That’s what they have in Belgium, so it’s possible,” he said. The number of parties doesn’t matter, as long as you “agree on what you want to do, and then stick together and support each other,” he added.
This week’s vote came just two years after the Netherlands’ previous election. Schoof’s government, a coalition of PVV with the VVD, the centrist New Social Contract (NSC), and the populist Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB), was marked by infighting and collapsed within a year when Wilders withdrew his party over a dispute about asylum policy.
NSC, with 20 seats, was one of the biggest winners in the 2023 election, but secured none in this week’s vote. Former party leader and founder Pieter Omtzigt left politics earlier this year. Other parties in the former government also lost seats, including Wilders’ PVV, which dropped 11 seats.
Schoof acknowledged the parties in his government had been punished, while NSC “evaporated.”
“I think people are unhappy with what’s been delivered, and about the fact that the Cabinet hasn’t managed to see things through,” he said.