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Notes -
Dutch elections happened on Wednesday.
The background is that the cordon sanitaire against the populist right broke after the November 2023 election. After protracted negotiations, Dick Schoof became an independent Prime Minister in May 2024, leading a coalition of the PVV (right-populist, led by Geert Wilders), the VVD (right-liberal), BBB (agrarian populist), and NSC (Christian Democrats LARPing as populists). Schoof's background was as a career civil servant working on internal security - his last job before becoming PM was as secretary-general (the top career bureaucrat in a department, equivalent to a UK permanent secretary) at the Ministry of Justice and Security - he was acceptable to the PVV because he had previously become controversial as the head of the unit responsible for infiltrating mosques and spying on suspected Islamist terrorists. The Schoof cabinet collapsed after less than a year in June 2025 after a row over refugee policy (there were many disagreements, but it looks like the critical one is that the PVV wanted to start deporting Syrian refugees back to Syria on the grounds that the civil war was over), leading the early elections.
The UK MSM has focussed on the legally irrelevant but news-generating (because close) question of which party "won" by getting most votes nationally - the left-liberal D66 are 15,000 votes ahead of PVV with about 30,000 still to be counted. (At points yesterday they were only 2,000 ahead). But this doesn't matter - the Netherlands uses list-based PR and both parties will get 26 seats (out of 150). D66 leader Rob Jetten is the de facto Prime Minister-elect.
We are smarter than the MSM, so lets take a less retarded perspective. This was a throw-the-bums-out election, with all 4 governing parties taking a bath. PVV are down from 37 to 26, VVS are down from 24 to 22, BBB down from 7 to 4, and NSC down from 20 to zero (oops!). So 36 seats lost by former governing parties.
The other loser is the main centre-left list (a de facto merger between the Greens and the PvdA, which is the Dutch equivalent of UK Labour) is down from 25 to 20.
The gainers are D66 (up from 9 to 26), the Christian Democratic CDA (up from 5 to 18, mostly from NSC voters returning to their traditional party), and two smaller right-populist parties. FvD (further right than PVV - they support an EU exit referendum and don't kick out actual brownshirt-and-swastika Nazis) are up from 3 to 7 and JA21 (who split from FvD after FvD leadership refused to kick out some youth activists who publicly stanned Anders Breivik, but now claim to be less right-wing than PVV) are up from 1 to 9.
What are the possible takeaways?
My non-expert guesses about coalition formation:
Parties that will definitely not join a D66-led coalition (48/150):
Parties that are very unlikely to join a D66-led coalition (13/150):
Parties that might join a D66-led coalition (89/150 with 76 needed for a majority)
So the only possible majority coalition is the one that combines all four traditional major parties (D66, VVD, PvdA and CDA). A coalition including right-populists is unlikely after what happened last time. It is also hard to form - the total for left and liberal parties that wouldn't touch right populists with a bargepole is 58 seats leaving the right needing to get 76 out of a possible 92 votes while dealing with the bad blood between the former governing parties, and also the rival right populist parties. A left-wing coalition can similarly forget about the right populists, SGP, CU and VVD meaning they need 76 out of 80 available votes while dealing with the People's Front of Judea.
I predict a minority government. D66 historically prefer to work with VVD and PvdA, leaving them 8 seats short of a majority and with plenty of places to go looking for them on a vote-by-vote basis. But the 4-way Grand Coalition definitely could happen.
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