International coverage framed the Oct. 29 Dutch election, like every Dutch election, as a contest between the far right and broadly centrist forces. But what really set this election apart was generational turnover.
Older millennials, 38- to 44-year-olds, now hold the levers of power in Dutch politics, and their policy agenda bears the imprint of their generation’s experiences in the 2000s and 2010s. The politicians who thought defense spending was there to be cut whenever they needed fiscal space are gone; the fiscal policy orthodoxies of the Great Recession are weakened; and housing policy is front of mind as it has not been since the postwar era.
The outgoing independent prime minister, Dick Schoof, 68, will likely be succeeded by Democrats 66 (D66) leader Rob Jetten, 38. D66, a socially liberal and economically centrist party that dominates among well-off urban voters, secured its best-ever results. Its 26 seats, up from nine in 2023, will make it the largest party in the Dutch lower chamber, tied with right-wing leader Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom (PVV), which received a few thousand fewer votes.
While the leader of the largest party does not necessarily become prime minister, by convention he takes the lead in attempting to form a government. Jetten has announced that he will try to form a (very) broad centrist government that spans the GreenLeft-Labor Party, the centrist Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA), and the center-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD). These are four of the five largest parties in the new parliament; they all refuse to govern with Wilders’s PVV, though that refusal is perhaps less credible in the VVD’s case.
Wilders, 62 and the longest-serving Dutch MP by an eight-year margin, finally got his party into government last year. He failed miserably at the task of governing, lost about a third of his party’s seats, and is returning to the opposition benches, where he feels most comfortable and will likely spend the remainder of his years. His legacy is one of unhinged rhetoric and zero policy accomplishments. As Wilders eases into retirement, there are two main contenders to occupy the electoral space he has dominated for two decades.
Forum for Democracy (FvD) initially presented itself as a Euroskeptic, culturally conservative, economically libertarian party. It won the 2019 provincial elections, making it the largest party in the Dutch Senate until the Farmer-Citizen Movement took its place in 2023. The FvD then descended into pro-Russian and anti-vaccination lunacy and conflicts over how much antisemitism, racism, and homophobia ought to be tolerated within the party. Many of its elected officials left, sitting as independents or founding new parties.
The FvD’s charismatic founder, Thierry Baudet, 42, found himself at the heart of many of these controversies. He chose to let MP Lidewij de Vos, 28, lead the party into the Oct. 29 election. With de Vos as its less deranged face, the FvD more than doubled its seat count, from three to seven.
One of the parties that emerged from the FvD’s implosion was JA21, the other party to benefit from Wilders’s losses last month, going from one to nine MPs. If the FvD are the Dutch Groypers, JA21 leader Joost Eerdmans is the Dutch Kevin Roberts. Eerdmans, 54, has been active in six different political parties, navigating the changing ideological winds on the Dutch right. His party includes both hard-line national conservatives, such as Annabel Nanninga, 47, and more mainstream figures, such as Ingrid Coenradie, 37, a former deputy minister for justice and security. (The JA in JA21 stands for Juiste Antwoord, “Right Answer,” as well as for Joost and Annabel.)
A party composed almost entirely of people with a history of quitting other parties is of course a disaster waiting to happen. Case in point: Nanninga’s successor in the Senate, which she will leave when she is sworn in as an MP, left the party last year and will sit as an independent.
Next to Wilders, the election’s most disappointing performance was by Frans Timmermans, 64, a former executive vice president of the European Commission. He led GreenLeft-Labor to a surprise election loss, despite nominally leading the opposition to a disastrous government. He announced his resignation on election night and was succeeded by GreenLeft leader Jesse Klaver, 39.
On the center-right, Pieter Omtzigt, 51, was with Wilders the great victor of the 2023 elections. New Social Contract, the party he founded after leaving the CDA, had won 20 seats mere months after coming into existence. After campaigning on a promise of good government, he formed an uneasy coalition with Wilders’s party, the Farmer-Citizen Movement, and the VVD that delivered the opposite. Omtzigt threw in the towel this year, and what remained of his party failed to win even one seat.
Many of Omtzigt’s voters returned to the mothership, the CDA, now led by Henri Bontenbal, 42. After some time in the wilderness following the four Jan Peter Balkenende cabinets of the 2000s, Bontenbal has guided the party back to the center of Dutch politics. As the party’s first leader, Dries van Agt, put it: “We do not bend to the left, and we do not bend to the right.” The new government will inevitably include the CDA.
The challenge for Jetten is now to convince the VVD to accept a coalition that includes GreenLeft-Labor, even if VVD leader Dilan Yesilgoz, 48, insists on including JA21 instead to avoid getting squeezed electorally. In addition to the risks associated with JA21 discussed earlier, a D66-VVD-CDA-JA21 would hold only 75 seats in Parliament—not even a majority—and just 23 (of 75) in the Senate. Legislating would be difficult, and yet another early election would be likely.
No matter which coalition materializes, it has its work cut out for it.
Dutch politicians have spent the past few years obsessing over immigration policy, which bought down the two most recent Dutch cabinets—without making any meaningful changes. In response, some parties, especially on the left, have adopted explicit targets for net migration. GreenLeft-Labor, for example, has promised net migration of 40,000-60,000 per year, a number that in per capita terms roughly corresponds to net migration in the United States during the first Trump administration.
Hitting such targets would require shooting the country in the foot by restricting the enrollment of foreign students at Dutch universities, increasing the minimum wage to exclude low-skilled workers from within the European Union, or limiting the influx of high-skilled immigrants who are crucial to the success of the most successful Dutch companies.
The immigration policy debate has gotten entangled with persistent tightness in the housing market. Home prices have outpaced inflation and the borrowing capacity of Dutch households for years now. The expansive Dutch social housing system is plagued by long waiting periods, which are particularly problematic when asylum-seekers are granted status and need a place to live. Recent governments have not met their housing construction targets, and under current policy, it is unlikely that will change.
One reason to be hopeful is that this new generation of Dutch politicians, like their contemporaries in practically every advanced economy, are keenly aware of how urgent addressing the lack of supply responses to escalating home prices is and how central it is to many young voters’ lived experience.
But turning that sense of urgency into policy will not be easy. The CDA has proposed phasing out the mortgage interest deduction, which may put some downward pressure on prices but will do nothing to increase supply. D66 has suggested constructing what the party refers to as “ten new cities,” but the fine print in the party’s platform suggests that any new construction of more than minimal amounts of housing counts as a city.
An idiosyncratic Duch constraint on housing production and business is its ongoing nitrogen crisis. Excessive nitrogen emissions can pose a threat to natural habitats and biodiversity, and in a densely populated country with a large agricultural sector and many small nature preserves, such threats are everywhere.
For years, Dutch politicians have refused to make clear choices about which kinds of activities or land uses to prioritize. As a result, practically every construction project or manufacturing facility either is now on hold or requires extensive licensing procedures. If any combination of parties can develop a solution, it may well be D66, which has a strong environmentalist streak, and the CDA, with its historically more rural base of support.
The leading figures in the new coalition will all be strong supporters of NATO and of Ukraine. They are committed to increasing defense spending in line with the new NATO commitments, rebuilding the Dutch military after defense spending fell to barely more than 1 percent in the mid-2010s (ironically under Prime Minister Mark Rutte, now NATO’s secretary-general). There is a broad-based understanding that the 1990s are long over.
The reductions in defense spending in the 2010s were motivated at least in part by a desire to limit deficit spending amid a long downturn. That orthodoxy has been weakened both by the painful memories of that slow recovery and by the relative success of the macroeconomic policy mix of the COVID-19 pandemic era. It should not surprise anyone if the millennials now in command of one of the Frugal Four show more openness to European fiscal integration and less instinctive repulsion toward more flexible fiscal policy when the moment, macroeconomic or geopolitical, calls for it.
