After years in power, the Dutch liberal party, once commanded by Mark Rutte, now faces a desperate fight for relevance in this week’s national election.
A slump in the polls by the Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) since the collapse of the Netherlands’ Cabinet in June has delivered a sobering reality check for a former electoral force that became near-synonymous with Dutch government, and the face of the country’s reputed liberal tradition in the EU.
Geert Wilders’ far-right Freedom Party (PVV) is projected to remain the Netherlands’ largest in Wednesday’s vote, according to the latest Ipsos I&O estimates. However, the center-left GreenLeft-Labor and liberal D66 parties are within striking distance.
Meanwhile, the liberal VVD risks winning even fewer seats than in the 2023 election — which already represented a major setback for the party — casting doubt on its role in any future government.
Its struggles echo the floundering of other European liberals in recent years, including President Emmanuel Macron in France, the Free Democratic Party in Germany and the Open VLD party of Belgium’s former Prime Minister Alexander De Croo.
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Like other liberal parties in Europe, the VVD is “having major trouble to remain relevant in today’s battle of narratives,” said Mark Thiessen, a former VVD campaign strategist, who now has his own communications agency, Meute.
With issues like housing and migration dominating Dutch campaign discourse, internal party divisions have come to the fore as the economy and liberal freedoms don’t figure as prominently in the political debate.
“You can tell that … when the debate focuses on topics like identity and open society, people really do think differently from one another. And that can become a problem,” Thiessen said.
That divide was evident when Cees van de Sanden, a member of the upper house, announced this month that he’d leave the VVD to strike out on his own and take his seat with him. By cozying up to Wilders’ far-right party and supporting its stance on migration, the VVD has lost track of core values, Van de Sanden told Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant.
“We have lost our liberal compass,” he added.
The Rutte effect
His complaints are just one side of the coin.
The VVD is bleeding voters everywhere. “Both to the center and to the right flank,” added Asher van der Schelde, senior researcher at Ipsos I&O.
Voters who think VVD leader Dilan Yeşilgöz’s style is too populist are now leaning toward the Christian-Democratic CDA or the more “optimistic” liberal D66 party of Rob Jetten, which has overtaken the VVD in recent polls.
Still others are veering to JA21, a more conservative party, over complaints that Yeşilgöz didn’t do enough to halt migration, according to Van der Schelde.
Some of the party’s misery is down to the “Rutte effect,” said Tom De Bruyne, another campaign strategist, about the prime minister-turned-NATO chief.
He argued the fault lines between progressive liberals and conservative liberals wouldn’t be a problem for a party with a solid foundation, but that would have required a step back so a new generation could breathe fresh life into the platform.
Instead, the VVD won four straight elections and led four consecutive governments under Rutte’s leadership, before collapsing over disagreements over migration policy.
Rutte won those campaigns with a promise of stable leadership, rather than a compelling ideological narrative — a de facto CEO of the Netherlands.
“We’ve lived with the Rutte effect for too long, and then you suddenly get the lieutenants who get to take over, only to discover they don’t have a narrative,” he said.
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‘Wilders-lite’
Yeşilgöz is under pressure to turn the electoral tide.
The VVD leader has brushed off the poor projections, saying polls in the Netherlands customarily change dramatically in the run-up to elections. And indeed, after a months-long slump, the party gained some ground again in pre-election surveys.
One pollster projected a last-minute improvement for the VVD after a debate between leaders on Thursday, estimating it may only lose four seats, down from a previous 10-seat loss.
But “we’re not seeing that kind of increase,” cautioned Ipsos I&O’s Van der Schelde.
Yeşilgöz has managed to attract some new support from wavering PVV voters by excluding a new government with Wilders’ party this time around, and pitching herself as their only bet for a right-leaning Cabinet. In that sense, her strategy has been successful, “but I don’t think it has worked as well as she would have liked,” Van der Schelde said.
Yeşilgöz’s decision not to rule out a government with the PVV ahead of the 2023 election overturned Rutte’s longtime veto against a collaboration with Wilders — and was blamed for the far-right party’s breakthrough success.
The party positioned itself as “Wilders-lite” on the topic of migration to lure right-wing voters — but that strategic mistake only served to strengthen the original anti-migration party, De Bruyne said.
Thiessen, the other campaign strategist, said the VVD’s shift to the right was not only a “dangerous strategy” but also at odds with its liberal identity.
The Netherlands national parliament election: Poll of Polls
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For more polling data from across Europe visit POLITICO Poll of Polls.
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