On Wednesday November 22nd, tension reached its peak in all party headquarters in the Netherlands after polls announced a very uncertain result of the general election. But it was a real shock that the announcement of the first estimates caused: According to Ipsos, the Party for Freedom (PVV), Geert Wilders’ right-wing extremist formation, was promised to get 35 of the 150 parliamentary seats in the second chamber. Eighteen more than in the 2021 elections: a result never achieved before by the party founded in 2006 by the populist and anti-immigrant MP.
Mr Wilders’ party was expected to come in well ahead of the environmentalist and socialist left led by former European Commissioner Frans Timmermans (25 seats), according to estimates with a small margin of error. One of the big losers of the election is the Freedom and Democracy Party (VVD, liberal) of Dilan Yesilgöz, which succeeded the resigning Prime Minister Mark Rutte at the head of this liberal formation: it increases from 34 to 24 seats. The other parties in the outgoing government were sanctioned just as harshly: the Liberal Democrats of the D66 lost 14 of their 24 seats, the Christian Democrats lost half of their seats (5 instead of 10).
Also read: Article reserved for our subscribers Netherlands: Geert Wilders, last spoiler in very close general elections
While Caroline van der Plas’s Citizen Farmer Movement (BBB) (6 seats) is far from the performance it had hoped for, another newcomer, Pieter Omtzigt, the Christian Democrat dissident who only recently launched his New Social Contract, is getting a boost has 20 seats. But ultimately the election campaign was too long for the man who the polls had presented as the potential election winner by November 16th.
That day, another opinion poll suggesting a possible advance by the far right would have triggered a “strategic” reflex among voters on both the left and the right that would have punished Mr. Omtzigt. The former would therefore have wanted to strengthen their camp in order to counteract the danger of a government with Geert Wilders, the latter in order to ensure that a right-wing coalition would actually become possible. In the emergency, Mr Omtzigt lost his mind and lost around ten seats compared to the original forecasts.
Wilders: “The asylum tsunami must be contained”
Geert Wilders quickly appeared before his activists gathered in Scheveningen and promised on Wednesday evening to satisfy the two million citizens who voted for his party and who, in his opinion, need to “take back control of their country”. “The asylum tsunami must be contained, people must have more money in their wallets,” he explained and reiterated that it was no longer a question of talking “about the Koran and mosques”.
You still have 65% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.