The Netherlands have opted out of the populist revolution that many had perceived in Britons’ choice to exit the European Union last year and in the November election of Donald Trump. Perhaps people should be asking whether the perception wasn’t a mistake to begin with.
The Freedom Party of Geert Wilders appears to have won only 13 percent of the vote and only 19 out of 150 seats in yesterday’s elections, putting it in a three-way tie for second place in the Netherlands House of Representatives with the Christian Democratic and Democrats ’66 parties.
Wilders had led the field with his anti-immigrant platform for most of the race. But he ultimately fell far behind the Peoples’ Party of Prime Minister Mark Rutte, whose government will now live on as a motley mixture of center-right and centrist parties, some of which have what Americans would consider progressive leanings. Wilders will certainly and the Left will likely be in opposition.
A much bigger story than the fizzling Wilders was the utter destruction of the Dutch Labor Party, traditionally the main center-left party. It has been relegated to far-back-bench status after a pathetic seventh-place finish at the polls, expected to keep only nine seats, of the 38 it had held after the last election in 2012.
This might be the one thing that the Netherlands election has in common with the most recent British and American elections — the fact that the traditional party representing the center-left was pummelled, as the Washington Post’s Charles Lane observed:
Maybe we’re all missing the real story in European politics which is not rise of populist right but fall of SocDem left#DutchElection
— Charles Lane (@ChuckLane1) March 15, 2017
The official final results don’t seem to be available anywhere yet, but once they are, it might be worth checking whether whether Wilders didn’t cannibalize some of the Labor vote with his modest surge in support. This would follow a pattern not unlike the one by which UKIP hurt British Labor in key constituencies in their election, and Trump won Democratic working-class voters in key parts of the small-town and rural Midwest.
