The campaign was about winners and polls, but hardly anyone really wanted to break with thirteen years of Rutte

An election campaign that was supposed to herald a new political chapter, with an emphasis on substantive themes and less polarization, has become a classic horse race in recent days. With polls showing that four parties are close to each other, thus creating their own unique dynamic. With party leaders who exclude each other, or not, and then come back to it. And with a great dominance of TV debates and polls that completely overshadowed the conversation.

The Netherlands will elect a new House of Representatives on Wednesday, and almost never on election day could four parties consider themselves a serious chance of becoming the largest. The campaign ended on Tuesday evening, in style, on NPO1. The NOS Final Debate confirmed the image of recent weeks: there was a lot of talk about political innovation and voters’ concerns about their lives. But hardly anyone did that to really break with thirteen years of Rutte.

Familiar new faces

Party leaders who have been running in The Hague for years presented themselves as the representatives of a new era. Dilan Yesilgöz (VVD, in The Hague since 2017) did not want to bear responsibility for what her party had done in thirteen years of Rutte, she told Frans Timmermans (GroenLinks-PvdA), among others. She accused him that he had been a minister in the second Rutte cabinet, and had therefore been there when the tough approach to fraud was initiated that led to the Benefits Affair. Timmermans called it “shameless” that her VVD did not want to reflect on the scandal that engulfed the Rutte III cabinet.

Pieter Omtzigt (NSC, Member of Parliament since 2003) addressed the doubting voter: “Do you want to continue with the same parties, or do you really want to make a different choice and get good new government?” In his debate with Henri Bontenbal (CDA), both party leaders brought up Omtzigt’s painful history in that party. Omtzigt left the House of Representatives faction in 2021. Bontenbal, Member of Parliament since June 2021 and one of the rare new faces, said that he could not be blamed for all the bad things from the Rutte era.

Little chance of stability

Due to the one-sided focus on a ‘winner’ of these elections, both by the parties themselves and in the image, the entire campaign remained out of the picture, indicating that the chance of any stability after the elections is not that great. Because whoever gets the initiative to take the first step in a cabinet formation will face a major problem. The relationships between the major parties are complicated. According to polls, the PVV of Geert Wilders (MP since 1998) can become the largest party, but Frans Timmermans (GroenLinks-PvdA) and Pieter Omtzigt (NSC) do not want to be in a coalition with him.

Timmerman’s will, he said earlier NRC, a coalition without the VVD. NSC looks more to the right than to the left, and does not seem to feel much love for GroenLinks-PvdA. And if Timmermans manages to turn the new left-wing combination into the largest party, then the progressive coalition he dreams of will be far from sight. Natural allies in this, such as D66, have fallen far too far in the polls for that.

Also read
A sky stormer looking for the political center

Double game with the PVV

The VVD played a double game with the PVV this campaign. On August 18, party leader Dilan Yesilgöz said that her party no longer rules out cooperation with the PVV in advance. This move increased the VVD’s room for maneuver after the elections. The party can then choose from more parties to negotiate with, and therefore make more demands.

But things turned out differently: the PVV rose in the polls in recent weeks, and that was partly due to the completely different position of Geert Wilders. A vote for him is no longer a vote for an opposition party, he can end up in a cabinet for the first time. Yesilgöz, apparently aware of the consequences of her first move, has backtracked in recent days. She said on Tuesday morning that the VVD will not sit in a cabinet with the PVV if Wilders becomes prime minister.

During the Final Debate, Yesilgöz sought as much distance as possible from the PVV. She “does not believe that Wilders can become prime minister” because his election manifesto “excludes groups of people” and because it states that the Netherlands must leave the European Union and Islam must disappear from the Netherlands. Wilders called this “a particularly sour reaction” and “Hague games” and did what he has often done this campaign, with a disruptive effect on the campaign so far: he called for cooperation. He then said that “the Netherlands is becoming one big asylum seeker center” and that he is standing up for “its own people.”

On the left – or rather: in the progressive corner of the electorate – two parties are competing for the favor of floating voters in the final phase of the campaign. While GroenLinks-PvdA and D66 had initially also intended to conduct a substantive campaign, the tone of their party leaders has become increasingly fierce and personal. Initially against the radical right; Both parties fear a conservative cabinet that will put an end to ambitious climate and nature policy and implement a killer migration policy. In different formulations, the final message from Timmermans and Rob Jetten was: “To keep Wilders out of the cabinet, you have to vote for us.”

Even more striking was that both party leaders started to get into each other’s throats. Timmermans first attacked Jetten on his policy as climate minister – “The Netherlands has been at a standstill for a thousand days.” And Jetten accused Timmermans of having “no backbone” when he abandoned the 2030 nitrogen deadline during an earlier TV debate. He did that again on Tuesday evening. “You have put your green ambitions on sale.”

It was Timmermans who reminded his progressive ally that it is better to join forces. “These small differences between us shouldn’t drive us apart, right?”