The election in the Netherlands has delivered a rebuke to the populist far-right and its virulently anti-Islamic leader, Geert Wilders. His far-right Party for Freedom (PVV) had captured the largest share of seats in 2023 by a wide margin but now looks set to lose 11 seats in the 150-seat parliament.
Wilders had precipitated the election when he pulled the party out of a short-lived, far-right led government. He had been deemed too extreme to become prime minister but collapsed the coalition after partners rejected his 10-point migration plan, which called for deploying the army to patrol borders, shutting refugee centres and repatriating many Syrian refugees.
The PVV and a surging centre -left party, Democracy 66 (D66), won similar amounts of votes, but the political toxicity of Wilders and his party’s political eclipse means it is no longer likely to be an acceptable partner in government for any of the mainstream parties. Coalition building among the 15 parties who crossed the 0.67 per cent threshold to be elected to parliament is expected to take months. The conservative Christian Democrats (CDA), centrist VVV, and the centre-left Greens-Labour, which was badly hit in the election, are all expected to be part of the mix.
The vote is a setback for Europe’s wider insurgent far-right whose rise in places like France, Germany, Britain and Italy, have been seen by many as unstoppable. In the Netherlands voters appear to have punished the PVV for its failure to deliver on its extreme and unreal promises, although some of its losses were picked up by small, similarly far-right parties. Populist rhetoric is not enough to hold voters though it remains a powerful force throughout Europe. The PVV still received 17 per cent of the total vote.
RM Block
The leader of D66, Rob Jetten (38), a former minister, ran a relentlessly optimistic campaign that focused on stability and hope and the possibility of tackling voters’ main preoccupation, the desperate housing shortage.
He now looks set to become the country’s next prime minister.
