FROM OUR REPORTER
THE HAGUE – The election polls have just come out and the congratulations are already pouring in. From neighboring France, Marine Le Pen: “A spectacular achievement by a people that refuses to see the flame of hope go out.” From Hungary, a little less distant, Viktor Orbán: “The wind of change is blowing here.” The ultra-sovereignists Geert Wilders is the leading party with 35 of 150 seats; more than double the 17 votes won in 2021 and several more than the 24 favored by the Liberals in the polls. “We are disappointed,” said Liberal leader Dilan Yesilgoz-Zegerius, previously known for her sovereignty, and briefly congratulated “the winners: Wilders and Timmermans.”
The two-headed beast of Labor and the Greens did slightly better than expected, proposing former European Commissioner Frans Timmermans as prime minister and convincing voters to give them 25 seats; And if they are now the second party, it is also due to the usual “Wilders effect”, which in at least three elections has shifted more than a few undecided votes to the left in order to stop the sovereigntists. Only fourth with twenty seats is the New Social Contract, founded by economist Pieter Omtzigt, which led the polls for weeks but lost momentum at the end of the campaign, partly because the leader said he was not sure whether he wanted to be prime minister. His party was founded three months ago; and certainly the “advancing new”, albeit with the face of the eternal ultra-right bogeyman Geert Wilders, has overwhelmed the establishment of the last 13 years. Out with Mark Rutte, out with Labor leader Attje Kuiken, out with more than half of the parliamentarians who did not stand for re-election.
As expected, the victim was the progressive party D66 (founded in the idealist year of 1966), which, although it could have supported the Rutte government with 24 seats in parliament in 2021, won only 10 today. Meteorological, but not too much, the farmers’ party BoerBurgerBeweging, which defeated the governing parties in last spring’s regional elections with anti-environmental demands and explosive Euroscepticism: today it won seven seats in the lower house, six more than the single place it occupied there .
“The Peasant Party and its parable are a reminder of how volatile the moods of the Dutch are,” comments the writer Tojne Heijman, who for years wrote a column in the newspaper Volkskrant dedicated to the daily lives of ordinary Dutch people. “There is always something new that causes ever greater discontent.” And increasingly violent campaigns that only end in one way: public disagreements, agreements between politicians behind closed doors.” This last phase seems to be the most difficult this time. Wilders leads the first party, but everyone else has ruled out governing with him; And even the Liberals, who would have accepted him as an ally in a government they supported, do not want to support him as prime minister. But without him the numbers don’t add up. Timmermans ruled out any alliance; and achieving a 76-seat majority would be easier for a coalition in which the other two major parties, the Liberals and the NSC, support him. Whose support cannot be taken for granted. The previous government took nine months to form, but this time it will have to close earlier to be ready for the European elections in June.