Democrats 66 (D66), a liberal centrist party, has narrowly beaten Geert Wilders' right-wing Party for Freedom (PVV) in the Netherlands' general election. With all but a few thousand votes yet to be counted, D66 will receive 27 seats to PVV's 26—a sharp decline for the latter, which won 37 seats the last time around. D66 leader Rob Jetten is likely to become the country's youngest prime minister ever, as he is well-placed to form a coalition in the 150-member Parliament.
All mainstream parties had already ruled out governing with Wilders, the anti-Islam firebrand whose PVV won 37 seats in 2023 then led a chaotic rightwing coalition that lasted less than a year before he torpedoed it in a row over his draconian immigration plans.
However, while this is the end of the self-described "most rightwing government ever", and there is a clear surge in support for centrist parties, experts said the far-right vote had simply shifted to smaller parties and trust in politics remains at just 4%.
Wilders was long a divisive figure in Dutch politics, but when his time came he whiffed it. From just a few months ago:
Geert Wilders, the flamboyant Islamophobe who leads the Dutch far right, today pulled his party from the governing coalition there after less than a year in power. The rift was caused by infighting over asylum applications and other immigration matters, but critics say Wilders got what he wanted and engineered his exit to trigger an election.
Opinion polls favoring Wilders turned out to be quite off.
That sudden reorientation is likely to usher in a more centrist government in the Netherlands, which says something about the state of not only Dutch politics but of populism in Europe more broadly. It shows that the far right, even in a place that had once seemed to be on an inexorable march toward greater power, is capable of hitting a roadblock.
