Liberals win in the Netherlands as Islamophobic Wilders suffers a crushing defeat

BrusselsSurprise in the Netherlands. The liberal D66 party, led by Rob Jetten, has won Wednesday's Dutch elections. against all odds And the Islamophobic Geert Wilders came in second place, according to exit polls conducted by Dutch public media. The progressive liberals won 27 seats, 18 more than in the previous elections. This significant increase contrasts sharply with that of the far right, which in the elections two years ago was the most voted party by a substantial margin, winning 37 seats. This year, despite polls predicting another comfortable victory, it lost 12 seats, falling to 25. Thus, the most likely scenario at the moment is the return of a centrist government to the Netherlands.

These exit polls are very reliable and usually predict the final results almost perfectly. However, the country's public media themselves warn that they can have a margin of error, which still makes it possible for Wilders to win the elections again. The final results will begin to be known this morning, and in fact, the far-right leader hasn't lost hope. "We expected a different result, but we have stood firm. We are more determined than ever and remain the second largest party, and perhaps even the largest in the Netherlands," Wilders wrote in X last night.

The party that first receives the task of trying to form a government is the one that wins the election. However, the Dutch electoral system fosters a very fragmented Parliament, and therefore political forces are obliged to form multi-party coalitions to govern. This year's winner, D66, for example, only obtained 27 of the 150 seats in the parliamentary chamber.

Forced to negotiate

Thus, Jetten, 38, is obliged to reach out to the other Dutch political parties. Beyond Wilders, who has vetoed all the country's major parties after the debacle he orchestrated in the last legislature, D66 will be able to open negotiations with the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD)—also liberal, though more conservative—which came in third place. Polls predicted a major setback for the VVD, the party of Mark Rutte, the longest-serving former prime minister in the country's history and current NATO Secretary General, but it salvaged its position, losing only one seat, down to 23. In fourth place is the exocratic socialist coalition of Frans Timmermans, the main proponents of the European Union's green agenda. However, the elections went worse for him than the polls had predicted and than the previous elections: he lost five seats and was left with 20. After the poll results were released, he expressed his "deep disappointment" and announced his resignation as leader of the progressive coalition.

He's hot on his heels the new sensation of Dutch politicsThe leader of the Christian Democratic Appeal, Henri Bontenbal, has almost quintupled his party's results, going from five to nineteen seats, although initial polls predicted even better results and placed him in second position. Both in terms of representation and the ideological space he occupies, Bontenbal is another name that seems highly likely to enter the new government with the progressive liberals of D66 and the conservative liberals of VVD, with potential participation from the Green and Social Democratic coalition.

The end of instability and the return to the center

Pre-election polls already indicated that the Dutch were tired of the instability caused by Wilders. In fact, in the previous legislature, it took the far right more than 200 days to gather enough support to form a government, which only lasted thirteen months, as Wilders himself brought it down in order to further tighten asylum laws. Even if he had won, Wilders would have found it very difficult to govern. All the major parties, even those that had previously supported him, had vetoed him during the election campaign because of the instability he had caused during the last legislature. It's worth remembering that, even if he had won the last election, the parties that supported Wilders had already made it a condition that he not be part of the government, and therefore, they backed a consensus candidate for prime minister: former high-ranking intelligence official Dick Schoof.

The meteoric rise of two parties and leaders who represent the exact opposite of the Islamophobic and populist Wilders is telling. Both Jetten, who won the elections, and Bontenbal achieved strong electoral results simply by promising stability and dialogue. This formula, aided by Wilders's poor governance, seems to have worked for them in ousting the far right from power.