The centrist D66 party has made substantial inroads in the Dutch elections, positioning it to lead the next government’s formation and make its leader, 38-year-old Rob Jetten, the country’s youngest prime minister.
With 98 per cent of ballots tallied early on Thursday, both D66 and Geert Wilders’ far-right Freedom Party (PVV) were projected to secure 26 seats each in the 150-member lower house.
D66 held a slender lead of 2,300 votes from approximately 10 million cast, with counting resuming on Thursday morning.
D66 notably almost tripled its seat count, marking the election’s largest gains, contrasting sharply with Mr Wilders’ party, which declined significantly from its 2023 record.
While initial exit polls suggested a narrow D66 victory, later counting showed a marginally stronger outcome for the anti-Islam populist faction.
This shift, however, is not expected to alter the next government coalition’s composition.
All major mainstream parties have ruled out governing with Wilders after he brought down the last coalition led by his PVV, leaving him no viable path to a majority.
The result instead seems to open a path for D66 leader Rob Jetten to form a government as the youngest ever prime minister of the Netherlands.
But on Thursday, Wilders insisted he would take the lead if the PVV ultimately came out on top.
“As long as it’s not 100 per cent clear, D66 can’t take the lead. We will do everything we can to prevent that,” he said in a post on X.
Wilders on Wednesday evening had said he was disappointed that his party had lost seats and was unlikely to be in the next government.
Cheers and chants of “Yes, we can” broke out at the D66 election night celebration as the crowd waved Dutch flags.
“We’ve shown not only to the Netherlands, but also to the world that it is possible to beat populist and extreme-right movements,” Jetten told the crowd.
“Millions of Dutch people today turned a page and said farewell to the politics of negativity, of hate, of endless ‘no we can’t’.”
