Geert Wilders gazes lovingly at Rob Jetten during TV debate, October 2025
This is a guest post by Pepijn Bergsen, a policy analyst at Medley Advisors but writing in a personal capacity. A Dutch national, he was formerly a research fellow at Chatham House and a country analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit.
Today’s headlines from the election in the Netherlands are focused on the lost seats of the far-right Party for Freedom (PVV), led by the strikingly coiffured Geert Wilders, and the surprising success of the progressive liberal D66. With the two tied at 26 seats each out of 150, some see this result as a victory for liberal forces. But they are missing the fact that the broad radical-right bloc has hardly changed in size.
Wilders underperformed after a bad PVV stint in government and a campaign in which he looked exhausted and failed to make the debate about migration. D66 benefitted from strategic voting and campaign dynamics working in favour of its charismatic young leader, Rob Jetten. Critically, Wilders’s shedding of almost a third of his seats was made up for by gains by other right-wing anti-establishment forces - one slightly more moderate than the PVV and the other on the conspiratorial end of the radical-right spectrum. The left, meanwhile, is on the verge of extinction – winning just 17% of the vote.
The main feature of modern Dutch elections is shifts between parts of the centrist bloc. This week’s election sets up more success for the populist right next time as another ineffective four-way coalition struggles to deliver anything. The election result and especially the campaign for it reveal that there has been nothing like a “return to the centre”. Instead, it’s the centre that continues to create the conditions for the radical right to thrive, even if Wilders and his right-wing frenemies keep getting in their own way.
Netherlands first
The Netherlands has long been ahead of the curve when it comes to political developments in Europe. Firstly, right-wing anti-establishment parties have been ascendant for decades. The Pim Fortuyn List – the party vehicle for one of the country’s first successful anti-establishment politicians, assassinated a week before the 2002 election – was in government more than 20 years ago. Secondly, Dutch elections have long resulted in highly fragmented parliaments, requiring consensus building and large coalitions. This so-called Dutchification is arguably worse than ever this year, with no party winning more than a fifth of the popular vote.
This is partly a result of having the most proportional voting system in Europe. New political movements find it easy to establish themselves in parliament and build from there. This led to 15 parties entering parliament in 2023 – a roster including several slightly different flavours of radical right, a long-established animal rights party (not to be confused with Greens, who just merged with the centre-left PvdA), a pensioners’ party and a minority-rights party.
Although this means coalition talks that stretch on for months and usually end in shaky coalitions, the system benefits from underlying stability. The Netherlands is one of the best-governed countries in Europe and, while governments don’t last long (only two in the past 30 years completed their terms), prime ministers hang around. The current premier – the unaffiliated Dick Schoof – is only the fifth person since 1982 to hold the position.
The superficially remarkable combination of a politically tumultuous country that is also among the world’s best-run led me in the past to defend the fragmented political system and hold it up as an example to fragmenting regimes like that in Germany. It provides voters with more choice and encourages political dynamism since new parties can quickly get a foothold. Admittedly, this comes with varying results. While the animal-rights party has been in parliament since 2006, the NSC, a two-year-old Christian Democrat spin-off, won 20 seats in 2023 and is already back to zero. Making this system work requires political culture to be consensus-driven but parliament has also shown itself capable of reform and making difficult choices (in the past, at least). Although they have their fair share of problems that recent governments have been unwilling or unable to tackle, the Dutch have a low debt burden and are better prepared than most for the economic and fiscal impact of a rapidly ageing population.
Yet, over the past year, The Hague has hosted a cabinet that achieved just about nothing. And this fractious coalition succeeded Mark Rutte’s final government, which never found a problem it didn’t try to solve by throwing money at it – a reflex enabled by years of budget surpluses following a turn to austerity after the global financial crisis. This never worked, as highlighted by one of the most pressing structural challenges faced by the Dutch economy: its “nitrogen crisis”. Emissions significantly above European norms have led to blocked construction permits and unsuccessful attempts by governments to reduce livestock numbers and reform the country’s large agricultural sector. Beyond fuelling the rise of the Farmer Citizen Movement (BBB) at the election two years ago, government policy further worsened the country’s housing crisis. This, in turn, intensified public frustration over immigration even though – to Wilder’s chagrin – this theme faded as a campaign issue for the first time since Fortuyn exploded onto the national stage a quarter century ago.
Six of one, half a dozen of the other
Speculating about the causes of populism has been a growth industry over the past decade (or two, in the case of the Netherlands). Beyond the standard explanations, ranging from economic anxiety to racism and the influence of social media, I would add the failure of the established parties to present credible options as they converged in the centre and hollowed out their social roots.
In some ways, this is unsurprising in the Netherlands. In a consensus-based system in which governments always consist of many parties, you need to be able to work with your political opponents from both ends of the spectrum after an election. But it is also detrimental to democracy, especially as the parties have become more alike in recent decades. Already in the 1990s, the centre-left moved to the centre as the PvdA formed a “purple” government with two flavours of liberals – the actual liberals of D66 and the conservative pro-business VVD – forming a Third Way government while Tony Blair was still in opposition.
This was on clear display again during the recent campaign. In the many televised debates, which tend to be influential in the Netherlands, the party leaders spent much of their time agreeing with each other. Instead of being treated to clashes of worldviews and visions for the future of the country, the voters who consumed the debates via linear TV or TikTok snippets were served fiery clashes over whether the annual €385 healthcare deductible should be a little lower or higher.
Another striking example of this dynamic was the broad agreement on the need to increase defence spending in line with NATO’s new targets. The debate was over whether these spending plans should be locked down for a decade or just for the next parliamentary term. You would be forgiven for thinking the populists have a point when they complain about the “party cartel” and the “uniparty”.
The end result is a political system defined by a populist-versus-establishment cleavage with just different flavours of both on offer. Similar dynamics are playing out across Europe, and not just in proportional systems. For example, what is contemporary French politics but far-right and far-left populists against the rest? Until European non-populists face this new reality and offer genuine alternatives not just to the populist challengers but to each other, the best we can hope for is a repeat of this week’s result. That is, an occasional Pyrrhic victory – assuming you count a minimal decrease in the far-right’s vote share a victory – and the ever-looming prospect of majority populist rule.
