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There may be just a few thousand votes between the two top parties in the Dutch national elections as the very final results come in for the dead heat vote.
With 99.7 per cent of votes counted, at the time of publication both Geert Wilders’ right-wing-sovereigntist Party For Freedom (PVV) and Rob Jetten’s centre-left-liberal Democrats 66 (D66) both have 16.7 per cent of the national vote. This is enough to give them 26 parliament seats each, well short of the 76 seats needed to form a government.
Until the final votes are counted it is unclear which party will edge out the other as the largest. The late votes, which include many in capital Amsterdam and those of Dutch citizens abroad, may favour D66 and the party may yet be able to — just — claim to be the winner with a margin of just a few hundred votes from a turnout of over 10 million.
Nevertheless, at the time of publication Mr Wilders’ PVV is ahead by a little less than 2,000 votes nationwide.
UPDATE 1530 — More votes counted
As earlier reported, those late votes are trickling in and they have certainly allowed D66 to pull — very slightly — ahead, so it looks like they will be taking the lead on government formation by appointing a ‘scout’ to sound out other potential coalition partners from tomorrow.
The gap has widened from just a few thousand votes with Wilders’ PVV in the lead, as it was this morning, to D66 sitting on 16.9 per cent nationally with 1.76 million votes, and PVV on 16.7 per cent and 1.74 million votes.
This doesn’t impact the number of seats apportioned — both parties look like they’re going to be entering the new parliament in joint-first place with 26 seats each.
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While Wilders can take some solace in his joint-first finish, it is a far cry from his 17-seat lead after the 2023 general election. Like in many European countries, almost all other parties agree to maintain a “cordon sanitaire”, refusing to work with any right-wing populist party such as the PVV to form a government.
It has often been the case that even border-control conservative parties would rather enter government with the left than work with a party to their right. Yet the scale of his convincing win then forced other right-wing parties to break the cordon and cooperate, out of respect for the democratic result.
In the end the coalition didn’t work; despite early promises other parties in the government were obstructionist on Mr Wilders delivering the border control reform his party had been elected for. In the end, Wilders walked away from the coalition, bringing the government down and forcing a snap election.
Building a coalition may be even more difficult this time, however, even if the final result sees Wilders’ faction edge out the D66 by a few hundred votes. Nevertheless, Mr Wilders has asked the Speaker of the House to hold off on government formation until the results of the election, including recounts, are truly set in stone.
He is reported by Dutch national broadcaster NOS to have said: “The differences are so small, and it formally matters who gets to start the exploratory phase… The rule is that the largest party starts, not how likely it is to form a coalition”.
Beyond the knife-edge finish, the election has held several other surprises. The Green-Left-Labour party of former European Commissioner Frans Timmermans was expected to come in a strong second-place position and was polled to possibly take a surprise first.
In either case, it would have been in a strong position to form the next government and make veteran Europhile globalist Timmermans the next Prime Minister of the Netherlands. But in a shock result, the Dutch people defied the pollsters and the party actually lost votes and seats. Once a titan of European politics, Timmermans said early Thursday morning that the Dutch people had delivered a verdict on his leadership and resigned on the spot.
Another notable result was the collapse of the New Social Contract (NSC) party, which campaigns on sound money, reforming government, and reducing immigration. It featured prominently in the last government but has churned leaders this year and they’ve gone from a respectable 20 seats in the house to zero.
Exit polls show most NSC voters drifted away to the legacy-conservative CDA, which correspondingly went from 5 to 18 seats, and to the liberal D66.
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