By Simon Otjes (Leiden University) and Léonie de Jonge (University of Tübingen)

On October 29, the Netherlands held a snap election after the fall of the cabinet Schoof, an ill-fated experimental government between the mainstream and the radical right, spearheaded by a non-partisan MP.
In the weeks leading up to the election, tensions around immigration and government policy were running high. On September 20, a crowd gathered in a park in the centre of The Hague to protest against immigration. Some of the protestors – including different radical and extreme-right activists as well as football hooligans – marched to the Binnenhof, the historical centre of political activity in the Netherlands. They carried Dutch flags and shouted Nazi slogan; others waved the flags of Forum for Democracy (Forum voor Democratie, FVD), an extreme-right opposition party. There, the protest turned into a riot, with participants directing their violence on the party headquarters of the progressive-liberal party Democrats 66 (Democraten 66, D66), located just opposite of parliament.
The demonstration shows how important migration has become as a political issue in the Netherlands. Indeed, migration would, once again, be a dominant theme in the campaign.
D66 temporarily boarded up the broken windows of its party headquarters with signs reading “democracy will not be broken”. Throughout the campaign, the party continually emphasized the need for democratic parties to work together. During the final debates, D66-leader Rob Jetten pledged to end the era of Geert Wilders. On election night, D66 emerged as the largest party, narrowly beating Wilders’s PVV by a few thousand votes. International media were quick to comment that Dutch voters had dealt a major setback to the far right. But was that indeed the case?

The Collapse of the Schoof Government
To understand the political dynamics behind the 2025 election, it is necessary to look back at the short-lived Schoof coalition. The Schoof coalition was formed by four parties after months-long negotiations following the 2023 election: the populist radical right PVV, the conservative-liberal Liberal Party (Volkspartij voor de Vrijheid, VVD), the social-conservative New Social Contract (Nieuw Sociaal Contract, NSC) and the agrarian-populist Farmer-Citizen-Movement (BoerBurgerBeweging, BBB). During the coalition negotiations, the four parties had explicitly agreed to operate within the framework of the constitution and the principles of the rule of law. At the same time, each of the negotiating parties was allowed to set policy in its own priority area: the PVV on migration, the VVD on defense and the budget, NSC on government reform, and BBB on agriculture.
The eventual downfall of the government can be traced back to decisions made in the fall of 2024, when tensions over the PVV’s far-reaching anti-immigration plans clashed with the principles of the rule of law. The PVV initially acquiesced, but tensions remained. As the government’s anti-immigration agenda stalled, the PVV demanded in May 2025 that the coalition parties accept a new ten-point migration plan, which included using the army to secure borders, turning back all asylum seekers, and suspending EU asylum quotas. When the other parties refused, the PVV withdrew its support, effectively bringing down the government after months of political crises and near-collapses.
The PVV’s departure from the government did not end internal conflicts. For nearly a month, the three remaining parties quarreled over which of them would take over the coveted immigration portfolio left vacant by the PVV. Ultimately, the portfolio was divided among the three parties. However, in August, NSC withdrew from the government – effectively causing a second fall of the government – after the cabinet blocked plans by its foreign minister to increase diplomatic pressure on Israel to end its war in Gaza.

The Fate of the Governing Parties
With 37 seats, the PVV was the largest party in the outgoing parliament. The PVV is comparable to other populist radical right parties in Europe, combining nativist anti-immigrant and anti-Islam positions with a vision for a populist majoritarian democracy unstrained by the rule of law. The party moderated its Euroscepticism in recent years to become a more acceptable coalition party; similarly, it toned down its support for Putin’s Russia. The party is led by Geert Wilders – who is also the only member of the party. After the 2023 elections, the PVV remained popular and continued leading the polls even after the fall of the government. Indeed, Wilders was long able to skillfully deflect the responsibility for the fall of the cabinet to his coalition partners. However, just before the first big, televised election debate was to be held, Wilders’s name appeared on a list of targets from a Belgian Islamist terror cell. In response, Wilders decided to suspend his campaign and dropped out of multiple televised debates. With his absence, support for the PVV began to drop in the polls.
Post-election data indicates that only half of the voters who voted for the PVV in 2023 did so again in 2025, with the party losing most votes to people not turning out to vote, voting for the VVD or for other far-right parties, namely JA21 and FVD. Preliminary counts indicate that the PVV will end up with 26 seats, which still marks the second biggest result ever achieved by the PVV. In terms of votes, the party came in second, beaten only by D66. On average, Dutch parties that pull the plugs from governments typically lose about 20% of their seats. The 30% loss for the PVV is high but not exceptional.
The VVD also lost seats in the 2025 election. A conservative liberal party, it combines right-wing positions on immigration, environmental and economic issues with progressive positions on moral issues and strong support for the EU and NATO. The party is led by Dilan Yesilgöz, who took over from Mark Rutte in 2024, after he stepped down as the country’s longest serving Prime Minister in Dutch history (2010-2024). The VVD was not doing well in the polls after the fall of the cabinet. This is likely due to continuous in-fighting over the course of the party, as well as tactical mistakes of the party leader, who, among other things, falsely accused a pop-singer, of antisemitism – an allegation that caused him to flee the country after receiving death threats. When the campaign started, the VVD honed its message to focus on the conditions under which it would enter the next government. Yesilgöz declared that she would not govern with the PVV, nor with the GreenLeft-Labour combination, which she continuously framed as “radical left”. She also stated that she would not enter a government that would abolish the mortgage deduction, a tax deduction that benefits homeowners and artificially boosts housing prizes. The strategy appears to have paid off: the VVD ultimately lost only two of its 24 seats. While this looks relatively stable on the surface, post-electoral data shows that only about half of its 2023 voters returned to vote for the party again; instead, the VVD picked up voters from PVV and NSC, but also lost voters to D66 and Christian-Democratic Appeal (Christen-Democratisch Appèl, CDA).
The social-conservative NSC, built around Pieter Omtzigt, disrupted the political landscape in 2023 but struggled to maintain its foothold in the 2025 elections. Omtzigt had gained national prominence for exposing the childcare benefits scandal and advocating for the families affected by rigid government bureaucracies. This had put him at odds with the leadership of the CDA, where he long served as an MP, causing him to break away and form his own party just before the 2023 elections. The newly founded NSC was mainly based around Omtzigt and went on to win 20 seats from scratch, making it the second most successful newcomer party in terms of votes in Dutch history. Due to personal reasons, Omtzigt resigned from parliament in April 2025. This left his party leaderless and without a clear course. The party chose its minister of social affairs, Eddy van Hijum, as its new leader. Without Omtzigt, however, the party plummeted in the polls, making it unlikely that NSC would return at all, which decreased the number of media invitations in the run-up to the 2025 elections, thereby reinforcing its electoral decline. NSC eventually lost all seats, making one of the many flash-in-the-pan parties that Dutch politics has produced. It was actually the first time that a party with more than five seats in parliament disappeared completely from the Dutch parliament. The party’s supporters flocked to parties all over the political spectrum: in particular the CDA and D66 benefitted from this exodus.
The fourth coalition party, BBB, also lost support. BBB is an agrarian-populist party that rose to prominence in the spring of 2023 due to its opposition to the Rutte IV government’s plans to forcibly shutdown cattle farms over nitrogen pollution. At the same time, the party had been able to mobilize regional resentment and broader dissatisfaction with politics. Ideologically, BBB shifted to the far right over the past year. It is moderately Eurosceptic and has accepted the NATO’s 5% norm only with great hesitation. In the 2023-2024 coalition formation, the party had the opportunity to tackle nitrogen pollution, but its agriculture minister stalled. The lack of concrete actions to address the issue also upset coalition partners VVD and NSC. As the party’s electoral appeal waned, the party leadership decided to focus on migration instead of agriculture, despite the latter being the party’s unique selling point. BBB eventually lost three of its seven seats. Only one in four voters from 2023 returned to the party, with losses going to abstentions and the VVD, while the party also attracted some voters from PVV and NSC.
On average, each of the coalition parties lost about half their seats in the election. This is similar to the losses suffered by the Rutte II and Rutte IV governments. The four coalition parties had a comfortable 88-seat majority out of 150 seats, but ended up with only 52 seats.

The Left-wing Opposition
The Schoof government faced opposition from the left, Christian democrats, and the right. The main opposition party was the joint list of the GreenLeft (GroenLinks, GL) and the social-democratic Labour Party (Partij van de Arbeid, PvdA). As of 2023, these two parties have entered a slow process of merging. The party leader, Frans Timmermans, had returned to Dutch politics in 2023 after nearly a decade-long absence, during which he served as vice-president of the European Commission. Although he was seen as a strong representative for the Netherlands in the international arena, Timmermans was considered too elitist and out of touch with Dutch citizens.

In the run-up to the 2025 elections, the PvdA-GreenLeft coalition agreed on a program that was progressive, environmental, pro-European, and economically left-leaning. The joint list did adopt more conservative positions on defense and migration than its two predecessors had – particularly GreenLeft. For instance, the joint program set a net migration target and committed itself selves to limiting labour migration. The parties’ campaign lacked a clear focus, but in general, Timmermans tried to emphasize more economic issues, such as housing and healthcare. Although the party had been fairly stable in the polls in the months and years prior to the 2025 election, support for the party eventually dipped during the campaign as D66 surged. The party ended up losing five of its 25 seats, mainly to D66. Because of this defeat, Frans Timmermans announced his resignation as party leader on election night.
The social-liberal party D66 won only nine seats in 2023. This party is led by Rob Jetten, who previously served as climate minister. D66 is a progressive party on moral and cultural issues, combining this stance with environmentalism and a social-investment oriented economic agenda. The party is committed to liberal internationalism, the EU and defense investments. Electorally, D66 can appeal to voters from the centre-left and the centre-right. Under Jetten’s leadership, the party decided to reorient itself, focusing mainly on winning centre-right voters. While the party had previously been outspoken on progressive and cultural issues, the party now presented itself as centrist on cultural issues, such as migration – though most of this was rhetorical: the clearest sign of the party embracing a more nationalist course was that the party leader reclaimed the Dutch flag, which popped up at the party convention. Beyond this, the party presented an ambitious plan for housing, promising to construct ten new cities. All in all, the party presented itself as centrist party. The decision by Wilders to drop out of one of the televised debates proved a gamechanger for the party, as Rob Jetten was asked to step in, thereby reaching a wide audience with his positive centrism. Further strong debate performances, in particular vis-à-vis Geert Wilders, boosted the party. The party went on to triple its support, drawing in voters from parties to its left (GL-PvdA) and its right (NSC and VVD). The party received the largest share of the vote, but it would be the smallest “largest party” in the country’s history.
Small parties on the left include DENK (which means Think in Dutch, but Equality in Turkish) an ethnic minority interest party that focuses on improving the rights of bicultural citizens. This party maintained its three seats in parliament despite a leadership conflict in the run-up to the election. A second smaller party is the left-wing populist Socialist Party (Socialistische Partij, SP), which lost two of its five seats, with voters flocking to GL-PvdA and D66. The deep-green Party for the Animals (Partij voor de Dieren, PvdD) also faced internal problems as some of the party’s founders and one of its Senators left the party due to disagreements over the course of the party. Despite this, the party maintained its three seats. The small pan-European party Volt came under increasing pressure from D66 and ultimately lost one of its two seats.

The Christian-Democratic Opposition
The main party of the Christian-Democratic opposition is the CDA. This party takes centre-right positions on most moral, cultural, environmental and economic issues, and supports EU integration and greater investment in defense. Despite being one of the traditional governing parties in the Netherlands, CDA was left with only five seats after the 2023 elections, mainly due to the rise of NSC. As NSC declined in the polls, support for the CDA grew. In October, the CDA often polled second, only behind the PVV. Given that PVV was unlikely to return to government (as nearly all parties excluded them), this made their leader, Henri Bontenbal, who had only been in politics for a few years, a serious contender of the position of prime minister. However, during a TV interview in which Bontenbal was questioned about the tension between LGBT rights and freedom of education, he defended the right of schools to denounce homosexual relations. This marked a turning point in the campaign, as voters across the political spectrum reacted sharply to his remarks. The party’s moral conservatism was not new, but it had been unknown to many voters. The CDA then declined in the polls, falling to fifth place. Among those who voted for the CDA in 2025, more had supported NSC than the CDA in the 2023 election.
Two smaller parties of Christian-Democratic opposition, the Christian-social ChristianUnion (ChristenUnie, CU) and the Christian-conservative Reformed Political Party (Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij, SGP) each won three seats, the same number as in 2023. Where the CU takes more left-leaning positions on migration, environmental and economic issues, and the SGP is more right-wing, both are more conservative on moral issues than the CDA.

The Populist Opposition
In addition to the PVV, the Netherlands has two other far-right parties: FVD and JA21. FVD started out as Eurosceptic thinktank. It entered parliament in 2017 as more economically liberal competitor of the PVV. The party assumes clear far-right positions on cultural, moral, environmental, European and economic issues. In 2020, as reports emerged about antisemitism in the party’s youth wing, the more moderate flank of the party split of to form its own party: JA21.
The FVD has radicalized over the past years and can be characterized as an extreme right party: in the past, it has embraced conspiratorial thinking about the coronavirus, the Great Replacement conspiracy myth, and the Russian narrative on the war in Ukraine; one of its MPs was sentenced for inciting violence; two members of the party’s rank and file have been sentenced for planning a terror attack on another party leader; and the party’s leader, Thierry Baudet, was shunned by the media for his embrace of extreme-right conspiracy theories. The party won just three seats in 2023. For the 2025 elections, the party selected one of its party staffers, Lidewij de Vos, as their new party leader. This leadership change was merely strategic; she did not change the party’s course, spoke favourably of the party’s extreme-right youth wing and allowed the sentenced MP to return on the party’s list. De Vos was not shunned by the media, however: instead, the media cordon around FVD was lifted. The party more than doubled its seat share, winning seven seats. About a third of its votes came from the PVV, roughly the same share as the FVD retained.
JA21 developed in a different direction, trying hard to appear as the more ‘moderate’ contender in the far-right bloc. The party still holds conservative positions on cultural, environmental, and economic issues. On migration, it takes a hardline stance, including support remigration of people whose ‘integration’ has failed – but it does so without anti-elite rhetoric. JA21 supports membership of the EU and NATO. Perhaps the best way to understand JA21 is that -unlike the PVV and FVD- it does not deny climate change but does not believe the Netherlands can do much about it, instead proposing measures such as building higher dikes. That is to say: the party adopts extreme positions, but unlike FVD and PVV, it accepts scientific facts. The party is led by Joost Eerdmans, who has a long career in Dutch politics, serving as MP and alderman for various right-wing parties. In the 2025 election, JA21 went from one seat to nine, attracting voters who had previously supported the PVV, NSC and VVD.
Finally, one party returned from the dead on election night: the pensioners’ party 50PLUS, which had fallen out of parliament in the 2023 election due to infighting, returned to parliament with two seats.

Blocs
Did the elections end the era of Geert Wilders? Leaving aside the fact that Wilders has vowed on multiple occasions to remain in politics until old age, we know that Dutch voters tend to stay within ideological blocs, switching only between parties in the same bloc.
The far-right bloc (PVV, JA21, FVD, BBB) lost only two seats (from 48 to 46). The populist radical right vote was concentrated on the PVV in 2023, but now splintered between parties that are more moderate (JA21) and more extreme (FVD). All in all, the elections did not end the strong position of the far right in the Netherlands; in fact, as a whole, it has remained remarkably stable.
The left-wing bloc consists out of GL-PvdA, D66, SP, PvdD, DENK and Volt. D66 plays a special role in the party system as it is the only party that regularly attracts support from both the left and the centre-right bloc. In 2023, the parties of the left won 47 seats – their worst result ever. Now they are projected to receive 56 seats. Not only did the left-wing vote consolidate around D66, but the party also attracted support from the centre-right. The growth of the left is in part the result of its diversity. While D66 and GL-PvdA are ideologically quite similar, rhetorically, Jetten has positioned D66 in a more centrist manner.
The centre-right bloc (CDA, VVD, NSC, CU, SGP, 50PLUS) won 55 seats in the 2023 election but was now left with only 48. The centre-right bloc has never been smaller. The centre-right has mainly lost to D66. Despite this the parties are happy with the result given that they are likely to return to government.

Next steps
The Netherlands will now turn to coalition formation. This is bound to be a slow and complex process. One four-party government coalitions is possible: D66, VVD, GL-PvdA and CDA. A five-party government would consist out D66, VVD, CDA, JA21 and one of the smaller parties of the right, either BBB or SGP.
The first option would have a comfortable 86-seat majority. However, the VVD has already vetoed this option, as they do not want to cooperate with GL-PvdA. The two parties differ significantly on key issues such as economics, the environment, and migration. The second option is the government of choice of the VVD. For D66, cooperating solely with right-wing parties, particular the far-right JA21, BBB and/or SGP, would not be their first choice. However, the party has not ruled out this possibility.

Outlook
It would be an overstatement to claim that D66 has ended the era of radical right-wing dominance. The progressive party achieved only a modest victory over the populist radical-right PVV. The far right as a bloc remains remarkably stable, with the FVD – which can be seen as extreme right – doubling its support. Meanwhile, the more ‘moderate’ far-right party JA21 is preparing for potential coalition participation alongside D66. Forming a government will be challenging, protracted coalition negotiations are almost certain, and the stakes are high — the new coalition will have a hell of a job picking up the pieces left by the previous government, and if it fails, the far right remains poised to return with a vengeance.

Photo source: https://www.politico.eu/article/how-to-watch-the-dutch-election-like-a-pro-2/