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Written for Le Monde Diplomatique, December 2025.

‘Millions of Dutch people turned a page today’, Rob Jetten, the leader of the progressive-liberal party D66 proclaimed in his victory speech on election night. The right-wing populist Freedom Party of Geert Wilders had been beaten back, losing twelve of its 38 seats. Many commentators breathed a sigh of relief, as a resurgent centre seemed to restore its hold over Dutch politics. ‘A new generation liberates itself from the stranglehold of Wilders’, the progressive-liberal newspaper NRC wrote hopefully.

The international press echoed these sentiments: ‘Hurrah! Now it’s the turn of the centrist parties (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 30 October), ‘Lessons for liberals’ (Guardian, 5 November). ‘Millions of Dutch people turned a page today,’ said D66’s leader Rob Jetten on election night. And if you believe him, D66’s win offers hope to millions of Europeans and Americans. ‘Yes, you can defeat the populists,’ he told the New York Times on 4 November.

The general mood among progressives was far from festive however. In reality, the Dutch political landscape hadn’t changed all that much from the previous elections in 2023, when Geert Wilders scored his historic triumph. With 26 seats, D66 is the smallest victor in Dutch history, beating the PVV by a razor-thin margin. What’s more, the radical right bloc hasn’t actually diminished in size, it has merely become more fragmented. Meanwhile the largest left-wing party GreenLeft-PvdA comprised of greens and social democrats, only scored twenty seats. It’s leader, former European commissioner Frans Timmermans, stepped down on election night in response to this new historic low. Many predict it won’t be easy to form a stable centrist coalition government, with a powerful radical right opposition waiting in the wings.

The social construction of a crisis

The Netherlands has long prided itself on being a paragon of stability. In the past decade, the dominant party in the fragmented Dutch political landscape was the right-wing liberal VVD. It was led by Mark Rutte, the present secretary-general of NATO. A smooth political operator, Rutte was called ‘Teflon Mark’ by journalists for his surprising ability to survive political scandals unscathed. Rutte led four subsequent coalition governments from 2010 till 2024, making him the longest-serving prime minister of the Netherlands. Like centre-right parties in other European countries, the VVD had declared to never form government with right-wing populists, in particular Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party (PVV). At the same time, the VVD copied some of the radical-right positions on immigration and integration, presenting them in more moderate form. The VVD’s combination of neoliberal economics and right-wing cultural stances seemed to guarantee it a sizable right-wing voter coalition.

In the aftermath of the pandemic however, there was little appetite for the neoliberal economic formulas of the VVD. The inflationary anxiety that felled incumbents across the globe also made itself felt in the Netherlands. The cost of living, healthcare and the housing crisis were top voter concerns. At the same time however, immigration and asylum seekers loomed large on the political agenda. After the Syrian refugee crisis, the VVD had reduced the facilities for receiving asylum seekers. In a large cutback in 2017, almost fifty reception centres were closed and thousands of employees of the Dutch immigration service (IND) fired. The result was a stagnating asylum process, overcrowded reception centres and hundreds of asylum seekers forced to sleep outside in tents. The result was chaos and fights among asylum-seekers, all in front of the television cameras. Politicians soon spoke of a ‘migration crisis’. While the number of arriving asylum seekers was not out of the ordinary, the image of a country ‘flooded’ by an ‘uncontrollable flow’ of migration soon settled in the minds of citizens.

In the summer of 2023, the VVD decided to go all in on immigration. It tried to force through tougher immigration policies against the will of coalition partners, leading to a collapse of the fourth Rutte government. As prime minister Rutte took the exit to become secretary-general for NATO, the Dutch-Kurdish politician Dilan Yesilgöz took over the reins of the party. She was a culture warrior from the right flank of the party, who had made her name on law & order issues and immigration. Yesilgöz had a polished media presence, but with a far more polarizing style than Rutte. Under her leadership, the VVD decided to open the door to a coalition with the PVV. One of the frustrations of the ascendant right flank of the VVD, was that their party was continuously forced to form coalitions with the centre-left. There was in fact a solid right-wing majority in Dutch parliament, but since Wilders’ PVV was sidelined from possible coalitions, the VVD could not make full use of it.

In the ensuing election campaign, the VVD made immigration the central topic of debate. The country hasn’t stopped talking about it since. Concerns such as cost of living, housing, or healthcare were either marginalized or subsumed under the all-consuming frenzy over immigration. Both VVD and PVV were happy to spread lies on the topic and declared in televised debates that refugees were responsible for the housing shortage. In the end, it was Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party that profited most from this sad spectacle. Wilders won the 2023 elections and became the largest party with 38 seats. The VVD, unable to contain the forces of polarization it had itself unleashed, fell back from 34 to 24 seats. After much deliberation, a radical-right government of PVV, VVD, the famer’s party BBB and the newfound Christian democrat NSC was formed. It had a rather exceptional setup. No-one wanted to serve under Geert Wilders, a man with the reputation of a dictatorial control freak. Therefore, Rutte had asked Dick Schoof, a former senior official from the Dutch intelligence services, to become prime minister. All the party leaders remained in parliament, while the government was led by their adjutants. It proved to be a recipe for relentless chaos and infighting.

‘Let them try and fail’

After two decades of militant opposition, Wilders now had to govern to show the Dutch people he could deliver. Against better judgement, there was a pervasive hope that this would somehow be a pedagogical event. That Wilders’ failure would show his voters that his populist ‘solutions’ were a charade. The PVV was governed in highly authoritarian fashion by Geert Wilders, the only actual member of his own party. Since Wilders harboured suspicions of anyone with a degree of competence and charisma in his party, the people he recruited to serve under him were, as a rule, woefully incompetent. Another challenge for Wilders was that most of his migration policy proposals were in clear violation of the law. His centre-right coalition partners NSC and to a lesser degree the VVD, had demanded that the new government wouldn’t violate existing immigration law. It became a source of continuous tension within the Schoof government.

Contrary to what some expected, Geert Wilders didn’t use his pivotal position to govern and make actual policy. The Freedom Party’s central priority, ever since the party’s founding in 2006, had always been to change the country’s political discourse rather than enact policy, to pull the Overton window ever further to the right. Wilders effectively used shock tactics to centre attention on his agenda, allowing him to dominate the Dutch news cycle. That focus did not change while in government. Wilders centred all his efforts on declaring an emergency, which would allow his immigration minister to bypass parliament and implement emergency law to close the borders to asylum seekers. When this failed, he blamed his coalition partners for preventing him from pursuing his agenda. At the same time, the new radical right government blocked a law that would resolve the shortage of asylum seeker centres. It also made new cutbacks on the budget of the Dutch immigration service. Of course this would only worsen the situation, but since the radical right’s fortunes were tied up with the asylum seeker issue, actually trying to mitigate this problem would be politically damaging.

In the Dutch newspapers, commentators were shocked by the incompetence of the new government. There were reports of almost continuous quarrels, shouting matches in parliament among the governing parties, crying party leaders, snarky tweets, racist remarks in the council of ministers, open disagreements with senior officials, and dozens of Freedom Party MP’s that failed to pass a single amendment or attend a single parliamentary debate. Wilders left the governing coalition in protest last summer, complaining that the other coalition parties had blocked his agenda. The VVD reacted furiously and now returned to its old policy of vowing to never form government with the PVV.

What the Schoof government accomplished tended to be mostly negative in nature: cutbacks on development aid, universities, ministerial staff; tax breaks for companies and homeowners. And to top it off, there was the annulment, at the behest of farmers’ party BBB, of an ambitious policy to limit nitrogen emissions and make Dutch livestock farming more environmentally friendly. This was an attempt to resolve the ‘nitrogen crisis’ that arose when Dutch courts ruled that European environmental law prohibited any further emissions. Lots of permits for infrastructural and housing projects have been cancelled for this reason.

What commentators tended to overlook, was that the radical-right government was nonetheless successful on the ideological front: it managed to focus the country’s attention on immigration for a full two years, while normalizing the radical right and the framing of a migration crisis. The Overton window shifted massively to the right. Led by Dilan Yesilgöz, the VVD increasingly copied the political style of the radical right. She vilified the leftist opposition as dangerous radicals and out-of-touch elitists, spread disinformation on immigration numbers, and introduced tough measures seen by lawyers as violating existing treaties and immigration law. In this same period, the normally apolitical and centrist talkshows on Dutch television became evermore right-wing. Frans Timmermans and the left failed to get a fair hearing for their ideas in this hostile media-environment.  

The Dutch Labour Party (PvdA), with its dwindling and aging electorate, had decided in recent years to combine forces with the more youthful Green Left. This latter party had itself emerged out of a 1990s merger of communists, pacifists, left-Christians and greens. The Dutch Labour Party had been a firmly centrist party ever since the 1990s, but it was heavily punished by voters for its participation in austerity programmes in the aftermath of the eurocrisis. As a result of the merger, the GreenLeft-PvdA moved left. The former Third Way politician Frans Timmermans now ran on a solid leftist platform. But in both recent elections he failed to break into the dominant right-wing narrative on immigration.

A comeback for the centre?

Many had hoped that Dutch voters would punish the unrivalled incompetence of the outgoing Schoof government. It was only in the last two weeks of the election campaign however, that Wilders’ popularity took a hit in the polls. By this time, it was more the prospect of his renewed exclusion that motivated voters, rather than his unimpressive policy record. The VVD, the prime instigator of this political crisis, lost a mere two seats. In a move unfitting with traditional Dutch political mores, Dilan Yesilgöz held out the promise that she would block the left from entering any coalition government, and many right-wing voters voted strategically to make that happen. In the present highly fragmented landscape, the VVD is needed to form any possible coalition.

At the time of writing, the progressive-liberal D66 has begun the arduous task of forming a stable government. D66 embodies what theorist Nancy Fraser would call ‘progressive neoliberalism’: it represents the affluent, cosmopolitan part of the nation. The party’s success was driven by the optimism of its campaign. Rather than opposing Dutch nationalist sentiment wholesale, Rob Jetten adopted some of its symbolism, presenting his programme in front of large Dutch national flags. It was a feat of triangulation reminiscent of Bill Clinton, and seems to have touched a nerve among those parts of the Dutch population fed up with polarization.  

The only obvious coalition consists of centrist parties D66, the Christian democrats (CDA), the Green-Left PvdA and the VVD. This is also the preferred coalition of D66. The problem is that Yesilgöz has promised her voters she would resist such a coalition and has painted the left as dangerous radicals. The departure of Timmermans – so heavily vilified by the right that some voters mentioned thwarting Timmermans as their primary concern – gives a small opening for the VVD to change tack. But given its past record, the VVD will likely continue its flirtation with the radical right.

A crucial question will be whether the new centrist government will fall for the trap of trying to deliver on the concerns that fuelled the rise of the radical right. Of course, one could argue that national policy is not so relevant. A further toughening up of Dutch immigration policy is mostly symbolic, with the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum coming into force next June. But the centre-right parties will be under heavy pressure to deliver, and ‘take back control’, on some level. A more hopeful scenario would be that the new centrist government finally manages to change the national conservation. There are a series of policy deadlocks on climate, energy, housing and nitrogen that will be complex to resolve. Getting at least something done, changing the public image of a stagnant political system, will be crucial. At the same time, as the Dutch have turned increasingly inward, the world outside has rapidly changed. European debates on geopolitics, industrial policy, big tech and strategic autonomy have largely passed unnoticed here. It is likely that the pro-European D66 and GreenLeft-PvdA will change that provincial outlook to some degree, but there are large reserves of untapped Euroscepticism in the country as well.

As of yet, we haven’t really turned the page, we merely started a new paragraph. The following months will prove decisive