Dutch election: PM Mark Rutte claims victory and fourth term

5 min readMar 18, 2021

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s party has won the most seats in parliamentary elections, projections show.

Victory hands Mr Rutte a mandate to form a new coalition government led by his centre-right liberal VVD party, with a fourth term as prime minister.

His last government resigned in January over a child welfare fraud scandal.

While his party was set to win 35 out of 150 seats, another liberal party, the centre-left D66, was the other big winner of the night with 24 seats.

The far-right PVV was projected to win 17 seats, while two other right-wing populist parties did well too.

Left-wing parties fared poorly, and the centre-right Christian CDA also lost seats.

Turnout was high, at 82.6%.

Dutch vote as Covid crisis looms large
“The voters of the Netherlands have given my party an overwhelming vote of confidence,” Mr Rutte told reporters in parliament.

He conceded that “not everything has gone well in the last 10 years” but said the main challenge was to rebuild the country after the Covid-19 pandemic.

“I have the energy for another 10 years,” he said. The two parties that currently form a caretaker coalition with his VVD are likely partners in a new government, but the support of D66 and the CDA are not enough to form a majority.

After finding out that D66 was predicted to have the second-highest number of seats, party leader Sigrid Kaag jumped on the table with happiness. “What a wonderful evening,” she tweeted. “Now let’s get to work, the future won’t wait.”

She told reporters voters were ready for “the optimism and vision” of her party. “This evening it’s been confirmed that the Dutch are not extremists, but are moderate. People appreciate positivity.”

Geert Wilders, head of the PVV, said he had “hoped for more than 17 seats” but pledged that his party’s “counter-voice” would be heard from the opposition. Another far-right party, Forum for Democracy, was set to have eight seats, despite an anti-Semitism row in the run-up to the vote.

He promised to fix the Covid crisis, despite being the prime minister as it unfolded. Now voters have given Mark Rutte another chance.

His closest rival is no longer the anti-immigration populist Geert Wilders but a new leader, Sigrid Kaag, who appears to have galvanised voters on the left behind her more open and optimistic vision.

Her centrist party D66 has made the greatest gains — characterised as the Kaag-effect.

However, the fringe right-wing Forum for Democracy populists also surpassed expectations. They campaigned to end the lockdown and were the only party to hold rallies during the pandemic.

Mark Rutte will be first in line to find a formation that takes the government over the half way threshold to give them a majority inside this 150-seat parliament.

Sigrid Kaag would bring a lot of seats, but may use her newfound influence to try to steer the government to the left.

Andre Krouwel, a political scientist at the Free University of Amsterdam, said Mark Rutte faced a “minefield” if his current coalition partners, the Christian Democrats (CDA), decided they were too bruised by their losses and opted to “reassess and reinvent and reconnect with the electorate”.

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This election was widely seen as a referendum on the Dutch government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

More than 16,000 people have died of Covid-19 in the Netherlands, and anti-lockdown protests in the country have turned violent.

A night-time curfew is currently in place, as is a ban on public gatherings in the daytime, in order to try and curb the country’s high infection rates.

As a result, most of the election’s campaigns were conducted through television debates.

On election day, people cast their votes in sanitised ballot booths, and those classed as clinically vulnerable were able to vote early.

The Netherlands is governed by a proportional representation (PR) system and 37 parties took part in the race.

In order to calculate how seats are divided between the parties, the overall number of votes cast is divided by 150 — the number of seats in parliament.

Any party getting more than that number of votes is guaranteed at least one seat in parliament.

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Dutch election: PM Mark Rutte claims victory and fourth term

Written by Struck Of The Sky

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