In the Dutch parliamentary election on 29 October 2025 the progressive-liberal party Democrats 66 (D66) took 26 seats and the largest share of the vote. ‘A new generation frees itself from the stranglehold of Wilders,’ the progressive-liberal newspaper NRC wrote the next day.

The international press echoed these sentiments: ‘Hurrah! Now it’s the turn of the centrist parties (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 30 October), ‘Lessons for liberals’ (Guardian, 5 November). ‘Millions of Dutch people turned a page today,’ said D66’s leader Rob Jetten on election night. And if you believe him, D66’s win offers hope to millions of Europeans and Americans. ‘Yes, you can defeat the populists,’ he told the New York Times on 4 November.

Geert Wilders’s rightwing populist Freedom Party (PVV) had lost 12 of its 38 seats, but in reality, the Dutch political landscape hadn’t changed all that much since 2023, when Wilders scored his historic triumph. What’s more, the radical right bloc hasn’t diminished in size (it now has 42 seats versus 41 in 2023), it has merely become more fragmented. JA21 (Right Answer 2021) won nine seats, while Thierry Baudet’s Forum for Democracy took seven, at PVV’s expense. D66’s victory was the narrowest in Dutch political history, and Jetten may find it hard to form a coalition.

The Netherlands has long prided itself on its stability. Over the last three decades, the dominant party has been the rightwing liberal VVD, led for some of that time by Mark Rutte, a smooth political operator. Rutte headed four successive coalition governments from 2010 till 2024, making him the Netherlands’ longest-serving prime minister, and earned the nickname ‘Teflon Mark’ for his ability to survive political scandals. Like centre-right parties elsewhere in Europe, the VVD had sworn it would never form a government with the far right, though it copied some of their positions on immigration and integration, in more moderate form. The VVD’s (…)

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