Tight Dutch election race as anti-Islam populist Wilders’ hope for power dwindles

Geert Wilders’ anti-Islam Freedom Party faces a tight race in Wednesday’s Dutch election, and even if he wins the vote, his hopes of forming a new government appear slim.

Wilders was the clear winner the last time Dutch voters went to the polls in November 2023, but final opinion polls hours before the vote showed a drop in his support.

Dutch voters are grappling with a series of crises, from chronic housing shortages to overcrowded asylum centers. The cost of living is rising with extremely high rents and health care costs.

Unlike last time, Wilders’ rivals refused to work with him after he toppled his own coalition government last June.

Voting in most of the country’s more than 10,000 polling stations began at 07:30 local time (06:30 GMT) on Wednesday and ended at 21:00 (20:00 GMT).

Commentators believe it is more important who comes second in the vote than first, as this could decide who forms the next government.

Even if Wilders’ party comes out on top, the next Dutch government is more likely to come from the center left or right.

The race is wide open and more than a third of Dutch voters were considered undecided in the run-up to the election.

“This is one of the most important elections because people’s faith has to be restored,” said Sara de Lange, a professor of Dutch politics at Leiden University.

Fifteen parties are expected to win a share of the 150 seats in parliament, but opinion polls suggest four will stand out. In addition to Wilders’ PVV, there is GreenLeft-Labour under the leadership of former top EU official Frans Timmermans, Rob Jetten’s liberal D66 and Henri Bontenbaal’s centre-right Christian Democrats.

For almost half of Dutch voters, the housing crisis is a top priority, with a shortage of almost 400,000 homes in a population of 18 million.

Housing took center stage in televised debates ahead of Wednesday’s vote, and while Wilders blamed migration for the crisis, others pointed to a rise in single-person households and a deadlock in planning.

Most of the parties promised to tackle the problem head on. Frans Timmermans is promising at least 100,000 new homes a year if his party takes power, while the Liberals’ Rob Jetton says the solution lies in building 1% of farmland.

Unemployment hit 4% last month, a low for Europe but the highest level in four years in the Netherlands. The number of people claiming unemployment benefits rose 8.8 percent in the past year, signaling growing anxiety among workers about job security.

Considered an outsider in Dutch politics for so long, Geert Wilders played a key role in the last government, both establishing it and toppling it just 11 months later in a row over immigration.

His coalition partners refused to allow him to become prime minister, but having former spy chief Dick Schuff lead a technocratic cabinet was a decision that ultimately failed.

Former coalition partner Dylan Yesilgöz, leader of the conservative-liberal VVD, told Wilders that his “party exists as one person with a Twitter account and nothing more.”

Yesilgöz’s taunt was not entirely out of place, as Wilders does not allow the PVV to have members. Yesilgöz’s own VVD party falls to fifth place.

Wilders was left behind before the vote, having to apologize to Frans Timmermans after two Freedom Party MPs posted AI-generated images of the leftist leader being led away in handcuffs.

When Wilders won two years ago, Matthijs Roduijn of the University of Amsterdam says he was able to capture the votes of more radical right-wing voters worried about Islam and Eurosceptics alongside less radical voters.

“People called him Milders, a softer version of himself,” says Prof. Rooduijn, who points out that Wilders has since frozen many of his anti-Islam policies to appear more palatable.

Although Wilders is no longer talking about banning mosques and the Koran, he sees Islam as “the biggest existential threat to our freedom”, a view which Prof Rudoyn describes as “a really key element of his nativism – an exclusionary form of nationalism”.

In a televised debate, Wilders said “walk around (downtown Rotterdam) shopping on a Saturday night and it’s like you’re in Marrakesh; it’s not the Netherlands anymore”.

Left-wing leader Timmermans accused him of scapegoating an entire section of society: “You blame Islam.”

But the risk Wilders now faces is losing both the more radical voters if they fail to turn out and the less radical voters who might defect to other parties, including the anti-immigrant Ja21.

“At the moment I don’t think it’s very likely that Wilders will be part of a government coalition,” says Prof Rudwin.

It could take weeks – if not months – for the parties to form a coalition, but if the centre-right takes power, Christian Democrat Henri Bontenbal could be in the frame to lead it.

His CDA party has made a remarkable comeback, having only won five seats just two years ago.

Bontenbaal believes that Dutch voters now expect a return to “what I will call ‘boring politics’. The Netherlands is done with populism”.

However, he hasn’t had a great campaign.

Days after defending the right of religious schools to teach that homosexual relationships are wrong, he backtracked and admitted he had made a mistake.