Wilders’s Far-Right Party Faces Rebuke in the Netherlands

Dutch voters rebuked a far-right party in Wednesday’s national elections after it had caused months of political upheaval, and they unexpectedly threw support to a center-left party that ran on promises of stability and hope.

That sudden reorientation is likely to usher in a more centrist government in the Netherlands, which says something about the state of not only Dutch politics but of populism in Europe more broadly.

It shows that the far right, even in a place that had once seemed to be on an inexorable march toward greater power, is capable of hitting a roadblock.

“We though it was almost a deterministic thing, that the radical right was always going to become bigger — that they were bulletproof,” said Kristof Jacobs, a political scientist at Radboud University, which sits near the German border. “Not so bulletproof after all.”

Far-right parties that fail to deliver on their promises can be punished for that failure, Mr. Jacobs said. It had once seemed like nothing stuck to those parties, he added, because voters focused on their rhetoric.

On Thursday, official counts showed that Geert Wilders’s far-right Party for Freedom, which had swept into power in 2023, had lost 11 seats in the Dutch House of Representatives. It was projected to tie with the center-left party Democrats 66, or D66, to be the largest group in the legislature.

That vote amounted to a rebuke of Mr. Wilders’s party, which in 2023 had captured the largest share of seats by a wide margin. Mr. Wilders, a populist firebrand with stridently anti-Islam views, had himself spurred this election. In June, he pulled his party out of a governing coalition, necessitating the snap vote.

Voters did not ditch the far right entirely. Not only was Party for Freedom projected to tie for the most seats, according to the official count reported by the Dutch newswire ANP, but smaller, similarly-oriented parties picked up many of the seats that it had lost.

Dutch politics in recent years has offered a window into one of the biggest political trends sweeping the continent, given the popularity of Party for Freedom. Populist far-right parties have become entrenched across the continent, with France’s National Rally, Alternative for Germany (AfD), and Britain’s Reform UK all topping polls.

Yet they have faced mixed results at achieving power. Germany’s far-right party is shut out of governing. Spain’s Vox has been climbing in popularity, but it remains far from dominant. The right in Britain has surged and ebbed, and now seems to be on the rise again.

For Europe, the Dutch election may show that caustic statements alone are not enough to keep voters. Mr. Wilders’s party had made big promises about choking off asylum and scrapping climate regulations, and it had floated a referendum on leaving the European Union. But Party for Freedom could not rally the support to turn those extreme stances into reality, and it was the force behind an often dysfunctional coalition that it ultimately blew up.

“I think the Netherlands is a bit fed up,” said René Hendriks, a volunteer at a voting location in The Hague.

Democrats 66, named for the year the party was founded, ran on a platform that read like a rebuttal to far-right ideas.

The party’s slogan — “it can be done,” which scores of supporters chanted at a victory party on Wednesday night — had strong echoes of Barack Obama’s 2008 slogan, “yes we can.”

The leader of D66, Rob Jetten, ran a campaign of relentless optimism. It was the opposite of Mr. Wilders’s doom and gloom, said Mr. Jacobs, the political scientist.

Instead of Mr. Wilders, who is 62 and a longtime figure in Dutch politics, D66 is headed by the younger, less seasoned Mr. Jetten. A 38-year-old who became party leader in 2023, Mr. Jetten could become the country’s first openly gay prime minister.

“Part of the explanation is that they’ve had a good campaign,” said Sarah de Lange, a political scientist at Leiden University, noting that Mr. Jetten had performed well in televised debates.

D66 was also seen by many as a potential ticket to a sustainable coalition.

“A very important issue for some voters is regaining stability,” she said.

For many people, Mr. Wilders seemed to embody the opposite.

A political provocateur known for his anti-Islam and anti-Europe stances, Mr. Wilders has long touted extreme positions, arguing for ending immigration from Muslim countries as well as completely halting asylum.

When Mr. Wilders’s party entered the government, getting such policies through a coalition comprised mainly of more moderate right-wing parties proved difficult.

Mr. Wilders did not become prime minister because he lacked support from his fellow lawmakers. Then, this summer, he withdrew his party from the governing coalition because it would not push through his extreme migration plan — which caused the government to implode after less than a year.

He then campaigned on those very ideas.

Having found that governing alongside Mr. Wilders’s party was all but impossible, leaders from other big parties isolated it, saying before Wednesday’s vote that they would refuse to form a new coalition with Party for Freedom.

That may have pushed people to vote for parties that would have a bigger chance at actually ending up in government, experts said.

Plus, after months of instability, “there is a strong desire for center politics,” said Henk van der Kolk, a political scientist at the University of Amsterdam.

Natasja Thole-van Son, a conductor for the Dutch railways, said that when she cast her vote for Mr. Jetten in Rotterdam on Wednesday, she was focused on housing policy and on how the government comports itself, after much bickering and little action.

“What I also hope is that politicians will start behaving more maturely,” she said. “That’s something that has really annoyed me over the last two years. It’s like a kindergarten.”

While Wednesday’s election result was a clear slip for Party for Freedom, it was far from a funeral knell for Dutch populism. Not only was Mr. Wilders’s party projected to remain tied as the largest, but another far-right party, JA21, gained seats in the House of Representatives.

And parties to the left ceded ground as voters moved toward the center.

“It’s not like we were wiped off the map,” Mr. Wilders said.

That may make the lesson for the rest of Europe nuanced. Far-right populism is capable of faltering — but that does not mean it is going away.