What’s the story and why does it matter?
Dutch voters cast their ballots on 22 November in a snap parliamentary election called after the collapse in July of the outgoing coalition government headed by Mark Rutte, the EU’s second longest-serving leader after Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.
The savvy liberal-conservative, a fixture at EU summits since 2010, failed to overcome “irreconcilable differences” in his fragile four-party coalition over migration policy – and announced soon after resigning that he was giving up national politics.
The departure of the Dutch political scene’s great survivor means that for the first time in more than 13 years and four different coalition governments, the Netherlands will get a new leader. Quite who it will be, however, is very hard to say.
Four parties – Rutte’s People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), a Green-Labour alliance (GL/PvdA), Geert Wilders’ anti-Islam Party for Freedom (PVV) and New Social Contract (NSC), a brand-new party led by a popular former Christian Democrat MP – are vying for the lead in the polls.
None, however, looks likely to win more than 20% of the vote and, as ever, the next Dutch government – invariably an influential player on the EU and international stage – will emerge only after coalition negotiations that could well last months.
What’s the political landscape and how does the system work?
There are 150 MPs in the Dutch parliament, meaning a government needs 76 seats to form a majority. No single party ever manages this, and the Netherlands has been governed by coalitions for more than a century.
Parliament is elected every four years (or earlier if governments collapse) by proportional representation, based on an approved list of candidates in a single, nationwide constituency: any party that wins 0.67% of the vote is assured of a seat.
Alternating with the lower house, the 75 members of the senate are also elected every four years by the Netherlands’ 12 provincial councils. A government needs to be able to secure majority support in the upper house in order to pass new legislation.
Dutch politics have been marked in recent decades by a sharp decline in support for the historic parties of government from the centre-right and left, whose share of the vote has shrunk from more than 80% in the 1980s to just over 40% now.
This is a trend visible across Europe. In the Netherlands, it has been paralleled by a spectacular proliferation of smaller parties: 20 parties are represented in the outgoing parliament, 26 are running this time, and up to 18 could win at least one seat.
Who’s running and what are their platforms?
Rutte’s pro-market, socially liberal VVD party is now headed by the outgoing justice minister, Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius, who came to the Netherlands as a child refugee but aims to slash immigration and is seeking to become the country’s first female prime minister.
The VVD wants to introduce a two-tier refugee system, abolish permanent residency, allow citizenship only after 10 years, curb rents and boost private housebuilding. It has previously said it did not rule out a coalition with the far right, but has since rowed back somewhat.
The three-month-old NSC is headed by Pieter Omtzigt, a crusading former Christian Democrat MP best known for felling Rutte’s government in 2021 over a child benefit scandal.
Omtzigt is focused on “good governance” and “doing politics differently”. He aims to cut immigration, reform taxes and improve financial security for low-income families, and has said he could form a coalition with the other two main parties but not the far right.
The leftist GL/PvdA alliance between the Labour party and the ecologists of GreenLeft is led by Frans Timmermans, a former EU heavyweight who has pledged to restore trust in politics and build a more sustainable future and a stronger Europe.
Its policies include increasing the minimum wage and income support, raising taxes on big companies and high earners, investing in clean energy and insulation, forming “citizen councils”, capping rents and boosting social housing.
Wilders’ far-right, anti-Islam Party for Freedom (PVV) has finished in second or third place in recent elections but has until now been shut out of coalitions - although it briefly lent parliamentary support to Rutte’s first cabinet in 2010.
Wilders, whose manifesto calls for an asylum “stop” and a ban on “Islamic schools, Qu’rans and mosques”, has had recently appeared more conciliatory in a bid to appeal to possible coalition partners.
Several smaller parties with previous coalition experience could form part of an eventual left- or right-leaning coalition, including the Christian Democrats (CDA), the liberal-progressive D66 and the Christian-social Christian Union (CU).
Special-interest parties, including for animals (PvdD) and pensioners (50+), abound, but the other key player to watch is the populist Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB). Formed in 2020, the pro-farmer BBB surfed a wave of rural anger at government green policies to finish an unlikely first in provincial elections this year.
While its projected vote share has since plummeted from 22% to 6%, that March performance left it as the largest single party in the senate – and thus of considerable interest as a valuable coalition partner, or at least an ally.
What are the issues?
The last government fell over a bill to reduce asylum seekers, and cutting immigration – including foreign workers – remains a key issue for all main parties, as does the Dutch housing crisis: government-commissioned research suggests the country lacks 390,000 homes.
The green transition – and who will pay for it – is also high on the agenda amid heated debate in the the world’s second largest agricultural exporter, particularly over how to halve illegal nitrogen emission levels and by what date.
Government scandals – delays in compensation to earthquake victims living above the huge Groningen gas field; 20,000 families being wrongly accused of child benefit fraud, often on the basis of ethnicity – have also pushed trust in politics to the fore.
What happens after the vote?
Given the highly fragmented state of Dutch politics, what coalitions are possible is just as important as who actually wins. MPs first appoint an informateur, who sounds parties out and identifies possible alliances.
Once a viable coalition has been found, a formateur – usually the head of the largest party – begins negotiating and drawing up the formal coalition agreement. Last time around, the whole process took a record 271 days.
So what will the new government actually look like?
It is, frankly, anyone’s guess.
A lot will depend on who finishes first. Polling averages currently put the VVD on 18% and the GL/PvdA alliance just behind on 16%, level pegging with NSC, and with the PVV a point behind. Given margins of error and the large number of undecided voters, the four are effectively neck-and-neck.
The BBB on 6%, followed by D66 on 5%, the CDA, PvdD, far-left Socialist party (SP) and far-right Forum for Democracy (FvD) all on about 3%, and the others bringing up the rear.
One possibility is a straight three-way tie-up between the VVD, GL/PvdA and NSC, seen as more likely if GL-PvdA wins, but maybe less so in the event of a VVD or NSC victory.
If the VVD finishes first, a likely right-leaning constellation could include it, the NSC and the BBB. This would probably be a minority government - but it could probably negotiate a parliamentary supply deal with Wilders.
If the NSC wins it would want to shut out Wilders, leaving it looking at a potential six-party constellation with the VVD, BBB, CDA and a couple of smaller parties that would allow it to reach the slimmest of 76-seat majorities.
