Netherlands head to the polls

Just a quick post to note that the early election in the Netherlands has been set for 22 November, about 16 months before it would normally be due. The coalition government of prime minister Mark Rutte resigned a month ago (although Rutte remains in office as caretaker) after its different components were unable to agree on a proposed tightening of immigration laws.

You can read my report here on the last election, in March 2021. Seventeen parties won seats – voting is pure proportional representation with no threshold – but the four large mainstream parties (centre-right, centre-left and two rival liberal parties) won 82 of the 150 seats between them. Three far-right parties won a total of 28 seats, the far left nine and the Greens eight.

From there it took almost a year, until January 2022, to form a new government, but it ended up looking just the same as the previous one: Rutte, leader of the right-liberal People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), remained as prime minister (he first took the job in 2010), with his government also including the left-liberal D66, the centre-right Christian Democrats and a small conservative party, the Christian Union.

It all came to grief when Rutte tried to tack rightwards on immigration, proposing tough new rules (at least by Dutch standards) for asylum seekers. D66 and Christian Union refused to go along, and with no other options in the offering, an early poll was the only answer. Rutte has announced his retirement, as have several other party leaders.

Meanwhile there have been other changes in Dutch politics. Provincial elections held last March saw big wins for a new far-right party, the Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB); it capitalised on rural discontent while offering a somewhat more moderate alternative to the other fractious far-right parties. There’s also movement on the left, with the Greens and the centre-left Labor Party agreeing to run as a joint ticket, to be headed by European Union commissioner Frans Timmermans.

Opinion polls currently put VVD, BBB and the Greens/Labor alliance all about level in the high teens. Another far-right party, Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom, is polling around 10%, followed by a gap to D66 and the others. Mainstream parties still have majority support, but coalition-building is likely to be as difficult as ever. Although plenty could change between now and November, it seems unlikely that it will be possible to again exclude both the left and the far right from power.

Before then, there’ll be another early election, at the end of next month in Slovakia – which, unlike the Netherlands, is on the front line in the Ukraine war. We’ll have a look at that closer to the occasion.