Election preview: Netherlands

The Netherlands goes to the polls tomorrow in a parliamentary election being held 16 months early, following the resignation of its government in July over a dispute about immigration laws. Prime minister Mark Rutte, who has held the job since 2010, remains in office in a caretaker capacity, but has announced his retirement from politics.

I explained the basics of the election when it was called back in August, so there’s not much to add in a preview (you can also read about the last election, in 2021). Voting is straight d’Hondt proportional representation with no threshold, so typically a lot of parties win seats (17 last time): this year the landscape looks even more fragmented than usual, with no party polling above 20%.

Rutte’s party, the right-liberal People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), has previously put together broad coalitions with other centre and centre-right parties. His successor as party leader, Dilan Yeşilgöz, hopes to be in a position to do the same thing, although she has also held out the (slight) possibility of co-operating with the far-right Party for Freedom (PVV), led by veteran Geert Wilders. Although Yeşilgöz is herself the daughter of Kurdish refugees, she has continued the shift to the right on immigration issues that brought the last government unstuck.

In addition to VVD and PVV, two other tickets are polling in the mid- to high teens. One is a joint list between the centre-left Labor Party and the Greens, headed by European Union commissioner Frans Timmermans; its two components had 10.9% of the vote between them last time and look like improving on that. The other is a new centrist party, New Social Contract (NSC), formed just three months ago by Pieter Omtzigt as a breakaway from the Christian Democrats but already leading the field in some polls.

There’s an unusually large gap between the top four and the others, with a lot of parties jostling in the mid single figures. They include the other two main participants in the outgoing government, the Christian Democrats and the left-liberal D66; also the moderately far-right Farmer Citizen Movement (BBB), which shot to prominence earlier this year before declining almost as suddenly; plus the far-left Socialist Party, the Party for the Animals, and yet another far-right party, Forum for Democracy.

It seems probable that VVD, NSC and Greens/Labor will have a majority between them (or as close to it as doesn’t matter), in which case the question will be whether they can work together in government. If not, Omtzigt’s party will have to choose which of the other two to partner with and try to assemble a majority with the aid of some smaller parties.

Polls close at 7am Thursday, eastern Australian time, and results generally appear pretty quickly. But the process of finding a government can take a great deal longer.