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The liberal D66 party is neck-and-neck with the far-right Freedom party to be the biggest in the Netherlands, with 98 per cent of the votes in a parliamentary election counted.
Both parties were projected to win 26 seats, with only a small number of votes left to be counted on Thursday. The centre-right VVD was forecast to win 22 seats, while a joint Socialist-Green ticket was set for 20 and the centre-right Christian Democrats for 18. There are 150 seats in the lower house of the Netherlands parliament.
The election marked a major setback for the Freedom party, led by anti-Islam firebrand Geert Wilders, whose coalition government collapsed in June, and suggested the country was pivoting back to the political centre. The Freedom party was set to lose 11 seats.
The D66 campaign was led by former energy minister Rob Jetten, who will need to find sufficient partners to form a coalition government if his party emerges as the largest in parliament.
He hailed the expected victory as “historic” on Wednesday night.
“We have shown not only for the Netherlands but also for the world that it is possible to beat populist and extreme-right movements, and I am very eager to work with other parties to start a coalition as soon as possible,” he said.
That coalition must secure more than 75 seats in the lower house, and talks on establishing a government are expected to last several weeks or months.
The pro-EU Jetten, whose political style is sometimes compared to that of former prime minister and current Nato secretary-general Mark Rutte, pursued a bullish campaign to restore the Netherlands’ fortunes.
Jetten’s Barack Obama-esque campaign slogan “It is possible” went against the broadly pessimistic mood in the country.
Wilders wrote on X that he had “hoped for a different outcome” but added his party was still second, and might still emerge as the largest party.
When the Freedom party won the previous parliamentary elections in 2023, Wilders had to give up ambitions to be prime minister in order to form a coalition.
He proposed Dick Schoof, a former intelligence chief with no political affiliation, as prime minister, but his government was riven by frequent disputes and lasted only 11 months.
Frans Timmermans, the former European commissioner who led the Socialist campaign, announced he would quit as party leader.
“We did not succeed in convincing enough people to give us their votes. I take full responsibility for that,” Timmermans said.
