The Dutch government has fallen. Cabinet Rutte IV which was a centrist coalition government made up of the centre-right VVD, left-liberal D66, Christian democratic CDA and liberal Christian CU was unable to form an agreement on refugee policy which has escalated to a massive refugee crisis as refugees and economic migrants known as veiligelanders (literally translated as people from safe countries) has caused overcapacity as well as a rise in crime and harassment in cities and towns.
The VVD has for the last 12 years promised a tougher stance on migration but never followed through with it which has lead to backlash and accusations that they have always been empty campaign promises. Now alongside the CDA they wanted a tougher asylum policy to cope with the overcapacity however their centre-left partners D66 and CU refused to make concessions on this issue.
This was however the straw that broke the camels back as this government has been utterly tarred by numerous corruption scandals, crisis and inability to clean their reputation. Among these includes the housing crisis, farmer protests, childcare benefits affair, uncompensated earthquake damage in Groningen and persecution of critical politicians. Many agreed that the government would not be able to last.
With the government now fallen it’s now in caretaker mode (known as a demissionary cabinet) until the next election and coalition are formed, the next elections are likely to be held in mid-november.
As the elections come closer I will make a guide to all the Dutch political parties but right now there are however still unanswered questions. So what exactly can we expect?
Mark Rutte and VVD: The end or a fifth term?
Mark Rutte is officially the longest serving Prime Minister in Dutch history having served over 12 years. But this election might become his toughest one yet as the VVD is essentially stuck between a rock and a hard place.
With the party having been in power for so long the party’s entire image is now defined by Rutte’s leadership without the prospects of a legitimate successor.
Rutte might be a popular darling in the international and EU circles for having the image of a pragmatic liberal statesman but domestically he is currently one of the most unpopular world leaders with an approval rating sitting just at 24%. Yet he is their only chance to remain in power as they will certainly lose if they elect a new leader.
Known also by the nickname Teflon Mark for his ability to get re-elected in spite of numerous scandals and crises he continues to have a sizable voting base of people that are financially well off and don’t see a valid alternative in the opposition parties. He has also arguably been very lucky during election time as some event would always give him a poll bounce such as Covid or the Dutch-Turkish diplomatic dispute in 2017.
Currently according to Peil and I&O polls the VVD is trailing behind the Agrarian BBB where as Ipsos has VVD and BBB tied. This election could very well become a repeat of the provincial/senate elections of this year where the VVD ends up third behind the BBB and a united left respectively so this could very well be the end of Rutte. But he’s not called Teflon Mark for nothing. Expect him to try to campaign on a more right-wing stance on migration and similar issues as he can now brag about bringing down a government over refugees.
Caroline van der Plas and BBB: The Farmer’s Revolt
As the polls stand currently the BBB has been leading the pack but who are they? A party led by Caroline van der Plas the party is a right-leaning agrarian populist party that was founded in the wake of the farmer’s protests that have swept The Netherlands. Now the protests itself are a huge subject in of itself and to know why it has been such a big deal I would recommend checking out this article about it I wrote.
Initially the party just barely made it in the house of representatives last elections with a single seat. But since then the party has skyrocketed in the polls and seen unprecedented electoral success. They have become the largest in every single province in the last provincial elections this year and making it the largest party in the senate which is chosen by the politicians in the provinces.
What started as a party for farmers and rural people has now turned into a much more fundamental divide between the cities and pretty much everyone else. To understand the appeal of the party you have to understand that for a very long time the country has long been run by the Randstad which is the area with all the major cities.
This part of The Netherlands has always been disproportionally progressive and cosmopolitan which does not reflect the rest of the country. In addition many outside this area feel neglected and that politicians which are often seen as elites from The Hague should not talk on behalf of their issues. The earthquakes in Groningen and farmers protests only intensified this polarization.
BBB is essentially the manifestation of this sentiment. Their leader Caroline often speaks in what people see as a sober or common sense way of talking and she comes off as a generally relatable person who doesn’t talk like a politician. However the party’s success has also been largely attributed to the protests and they could lose momentum long term due to the party been more seen as a single issue agrarian party.
Ideologically BBB is more right-wing than the traditional centre-right parties VVD and CDA but less right-wing than the 3 main right-wing populist parties PVV, FvD and JA21. BBB has benefited strongly from positioning themselves in this vacuum by getting voters all those parties.
The party has faced accusations by the Dutch right of being soft or too compromising on cultural issues like migration although they have recently called for an 80% reduction on asylum quotas and pulling out of refugee treaties if they can’t be reformed. As it stands BBB as a single party is positioned to win but there are still two factors that could change things around.
Labour and Greens: Left-wing Unity?
I think it’s fair to say that the traditional Dutch left-wing has been doing disastrous the last few elections. The Labour Party (PvdA) once a juggernaut that was among the big 3 (CDA, Labour, VVD) has since 2017 faced Pasokification and collapsed to a mid-sized party with 9 seats. The Greens (GreenLeft or GL) had hoped to overtake them as the new big left-wing party with their new kid on the bloc and Trudeau lookalike Jesse Klaver but has since stagnated to 8 seats. The decline of the left has been a big reason for VVD’s dominance and a major boon for the socially liberal D66 party who benefited from left-leaning strategic voters last elections.
Due to these weak results there have been calls for Labour and Greens to merge or run together as they’re sensing an opportunity with a collapsing D66. And if they do then the VVD-BBB two way race could very well become a three way.
So far the leadership of the parties have been positive about a merger but in practice it has been a pretty slow process. Their first semi-attempt beyond local elections was in this year’s provincial elections where they promised that they would sit as a single faction in the senate. However they still ran on separate lists and are still separate parties. Both the leadership of Labour and Green have stated that they want a single list. There has however been some pushback on the provincial level as the Greens hold more radical views where as Labour members especially in the rural provinces hold more moderate views and are more willing to compromise on the controversial nitrogen issues with the BBB. But on the national level where the Labour Party has moved towards the left a single list may be inevitable.
Peil and I&O have Labour sitting around 11 seats and Greens around 12–14 putting them around 23-25 seats while Ipsos has them combined at 20 seats which would make them the second or third largest party, enough to turn this election into a three way race between BBB, VVD and Labour-Green and there’s also the possibility that being in this position could lead to strategic voting by left-leaning voters from D66, Socialists and Animal rights party.
However the prospect of a united ticket didn’t lead to much strategic voting or a surge for Labour and Greens in the provincial elections as they failed to win a single seat in the senate. There’s also a major issue about who will lead the unity ticket. The party leader is often seen as the factor that draws most voters to a party. For VVD that’s always been Rutte, for D66 it was Sigrid Kaag and for BBB it’s Caroline.
The left has however struggled with leadership and neither Labour leader Attje Kuiken nor Green leader Jesse Klaver are seen by people as strong candidates. Some names I have seen floating around include Rotterdam mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb and Vice-President of the European Commission Frans Timmermans.
Pieter Omtzigt: The Wild Card
The entire Dutch election and everything I just talked about could change entirely depending on a single former CDA MP. And that’s Pieter Omtzigt.
Initially nothing more than a relatively unknown backbencher for the CDA he rose to prominence for exposing the child welfare fraud scandal alongside SP MP Renske Leijten in which the government falsely accused over 26k parents of childcare fraud driving many into severe financial ruin which ultimately led to the fall of the third Rutte government (only for the exact parties to be re-elected a month later).
Now this is a pretty interesting thing because CDA was actually part of the government coalition and having an internal MP effectively expose such a big scandal did not really go over well. During the 2021 elections he attempted to become CDA leader but was ultimately defeated by the then health minister Hugo de Jonge in what was a pretty shady primary. But ultimately Hugo stepped down over his unpopular covid policies and was replaced by then finance minister Wopke Hoekstra without a primary.
Tensions escalated after the 2021 as during the formation talks there was a leak that stated “position Omtzigt, function elsewhere” implying that the establishment parties wanted Omtzigt gone which became known as Omtzigtgate and almost cost Rutte his career. This prompted Omtzigt to leave CDA and sit as an independent MP as the party showed an unwillingness to punish Rutte and come to his defense. Ever since then the prospect of an Omtzigt party has had a lot of talks.
A few hypothetical polls have been done on this scenario. According to the latest one by Peil Omtzigt’s party could win a whopping 38 seats if he were to enter the race pretty much towering over other parties. This would mainly come at the cost BBB, CDA, Labour, PVV and SP implying Omtzigt has a wide range of appeal to both the left and the right.
But there are some caveats. First of all we aren’t sure if Omtzigt even wants to do this in spite of the potential political capital. The prospects of his own party soured when he did not form one during the provincial elections and he has been known to have suffered from burnouts. After the government fell he has said that in the coming weeks he would talk about his political future.
Second this is a hypothetical poll as it entirely relies on Omtzigt’s name recognition and not what his party or ideology would look like.
Third it’s not entirely sure what Omtzigt’s platform and ideology are other than a general anti-establishment and anti-bureaucratic populism and he may turn off this broad voter base once he tries to form a concrete platform. But it is still undeniable that if he throws his hat into the ring it would shake up Dutch politics.
The Dutch Right: Way too many right-wing parties
The Dutch right-wing is in a rather paradoxical place. Never before have right-wing parties performed better in Dutch elections and have their best chance of entering a coalition government, especially if you include BBB as a party to the right of VVD. But due to the many new parties on the right the parties have been fractured and divided while in other countries there is currently usually one big right-wing party that’s surging on top.
The first factor of course is the sudden rise of BBB. Their populist stance on the farmer’s protests, appeal to rural voters and generally right-leaning appeal on cultural issues have swayed right-leaning voters away from these parties.
The second factor is the PVV and leadership of Geert Wilders. The PVV was always the go-to right-wing populist party and has since 2010 been among the largest sitting usually as the second or third biggest. But the party has always relied entirely on the name recognition of Geert Wilders and lacks structure on the provincial and local levels making them underperform in those. The PVV has also been accused of always being on the sidelines rather than showing a willingness to compromise making it impossible to form coalitions on the national level (however in their defense is this mainly the result of a cordon sanitaire imposing on them) so they have the reputation of a protest party and a protest party tends to lose seats when a new one comes around.
The third factor is FvD. In 2019 it became the largest party in the provincial elections and largest in the senate and was seen as the party that could dethrone VVD. This was because the party was generally seen as a more realistic PVV. A party for voters who thought the VVD was not right-wing enough and the PVV too unrealistic. Since then however their entire party has effectively imploded with so many scandals, defections and infighting that it requires a whole separate article. But to make it short the party has turned toxic for many voters and the huge gains they made in the 2019 provincial elections were pretty much all lost in this year’s provincial election.
Not counting BBB there are currently 4 right-wing populist parties with a chance of making it into the house next election. These are the aforementioned PVV and FvD and two parties that split from the FvD called JA21 and BVNL.
Both PVV and FvD are looking to be losing 3 seats in the latest polls with PVV going from 17 to 14 and FvD going from 8 to 5.
JA21 is currently performing the best out of them with them looking to double their seats from 3 to 6 although they used to do even better and have likely had their momentum slowed by BBB as well. They generally promote themselves as a more realistic right-wing alternative to PVV and FvD and are generally seen as having the platform of FvD during their peak in 2019.
BVNL is a classical liberal party formed by Wybren van Haga a former VVD MP who defected to FvD, became Baudet’s right hand man, then defected again to form his own party. The party aims to be more pro-business and less socially conservative than PVV, FvD and JA21. They’re barely polling at 1 seat currently.
In my personal opinion what we are seeing is more of a Meloni-effect where Dutch right-wing voters are moving away from parties shouting in the opposition eternally and are instead looking for right-leaning parties like BBB and JA21 to enter coalitions and make change even if they have to be more pragmatic than PVV or FvD.
Dutch parties are probably not even going to be able to form a coalition government
You’re probably seeing all these initials and think what the hell? VVD? BBB? Labour? Greens? PVV? JA21? How many of these parties are there? And that’s a major issue with Dutch politics right now.
Due to the fact that we have a proportional system with no official threshold it doesn’t take a lot for a party to actually win seats. As a result there are currently 18 parties projected to win at least a seat. And that’s without Omtzigt’s hypothetical party. Add to that the fact that no party is projected to win over 30 seats and you need 76 to form a majority and it leaves you wondering how a coalition will ever be possible.
Even the last two elections had the longest formation talks in Dutch history, for the most recent one it took 299 days to form a coalition with the exact same parties as the previous government which will certainly not have a majority anymore.
BBB has been able to form governments on the provincial level with the left and the right however the provinces tend to be more pragmatic and focus more on boring and less polarizing issues than actual national policies.
Based on current polling the coalition would at the very least require both BBB and VVD the two largest in the polls. But BBB has ruled out a coalition with VVD as long as Rutte remains as leader.
And even then who else could join? They could try to move right with BBB+VVD+CDA+JA21+SGP however this would require support from the PVV to get a majority which VVD and CDA rule out and it would be even more unstable than the first Rutte government that had VVD+CDA with PVV support and that already collapsed within 2 years.
They could try to move to the left with BBB+VVD+Labour/Greens+SP however the different stances on migration and nitrogen between BBB and the left makes this virtually impossible. VVD has also in the past opposed governments with too many left parties and SP rules out VVD coalition with Rutte in it.
A grand coalition of BBB+VVD+Labour/GL+D66 would be virtually impossible for the same reasons.
Any other possible coalition governments either don’t reach a majority or require fundamentally different parties to somehow work together. So we could very well see a situation like Bulgaria and Israel where we’ll be stuck repeating elections and at that point we’re in uncharted territory.
But all of this is speculation. Elections are still at least 4–5 months away and polls tend to change a lot more during election time. We’ll just have to say what the moves are going to be.
