In the Netherlands, politics is just as volatile as the weather. Up until a few weeks ago, it looked like establishment parties would dominate the Dutch elections, but popular consensus appears to have suddenly shifted in the immediate run-up to Wednesday’s vote.
Compared to last week, the latest Ipsos poll published on Tuesday, just a day before election day, shows that the conservative, anti-globalist Party for Freedom (PVV) has grown its support by an astonishing ten seats and is predicted to finish in second place with a total of 27.
However, establishment parties are still at the top. The government’s liberal, center-right VVD is leading the chart with 29 seats, while the Green-Left-Labour alliance (GL-PvdA) is in third place with a projected 24 seats.
The new party, Pieter Omtzigt’s centrist New Social Contract (NSC)—which has been predicted to be the winner for weeks—has lost seven seats in the polls and has fallen back to fourth place, with the latest projections only giving it 19 seats.
The youth is all-Right
At the same time, the so-called school elections, a now-traditional instrument to gauge the beliefs and preferences of the youth not yet old enough to vote, showed that the next generation will probably be even more conservative and will lead the country’s shift toward the populist Right.
A third of the 140,000 high schoolers who voted in Tuesday’s mock elections placed their trust in anti-globalist, eurosceptic parties. Wilder’s PVV came out on top with 15.9% of the votes, followed closely by Thierry Baudet’s Forum for Democracy (FvD) with 13.3%.
The Green-Left Party, which used to be the most popular among the youth, finished only in fourth place with 10.6%, slightly below the governing VVD (10.8%).
“All of the negative consequences of the policies of the last decade are going to affect the youth the most. They will have to live with all of the consequences of what their parents voted for,” FvD’s second in command, Frederik Jansen, told The European Conservative on Tuesday.
“On a very deep level, they know this, and they know that we [FvD] stand for change, for real change,” Jansen said, successfully predicting his party’s results among the youth before the results were published.
In the latest nationwide Ipsos poll, FvD was only projected to win three seats. Jansen, however, is confident that his party will eventually reach 6-8 seats regardless, as polls usually underestimate FvD’s support, precisely because of its high popularity among young adults.
Right-wing coalition still unlikely
Wilders and the PVV, however, will finish among the three most powerful parties in the next Dutch parliament. Unfortunately, if it’s up to the VVD, it’s unlikely to see the populists in the next government coalition.
“Unless Mr. Wilders says he would tear up his election program,” the PVV will not be allowed into the coalition, said the VVD’s prime minister candidate, Dilan Yesilgöz, during the last round of debates on Tuesday night. She added that Wilders wishes to ban Islam from the Netherlands and wants to leave the EU, which makes him incompatible with VVD.
Wilders, however, replied that he was open to collaboration for the sake of the people. “I would become the prime minister of all Dutch people, whatever your background is,” he said, before calling out Yesilgöz’s comment as a pointless political game that leads nowhere. “People just want us to solve the problems of the Netherlands, which means that we have to work together,” Wilders said.
Still, the center-right, liberal VVD is much more likely to strike a deal with the Franz Timmermans-led Green-Left-Labor bloc, the social-democrat D66, and the centrist NSC to form a government.
Any right-wing alternative coalition would need the support of the PVV, which has been ruled out not only by the VVD but also Omtzigt’s NSC, despite the latter campaigning on a socially conservative (but economically left-wing) platform.
Nonetheless, all that’s left is to wait for the results. In a country where coalition negotiations usually last for months, the real fight has yet to start.
