00:00The nail-biting finish is expected to lead to delays in starting the process of forming a new coalition.
00:07With only a few thousand votes separating the far-right party of Firebrand,
00:12Geert Wilders from pro-EU centrists, the results of elections in the Netherlands remain too close to call.
00:20But with all major parties having ruled out working with Wilders,
00:23D66 leader Rob Yetten is on track to become Prime Minister, even if his party comes in second.
00:31Well, for more on the significance of the vote and what happens next,
00:35let's bring in Nicholas Startan, Associate Professor in Politics and International Relations at the John Cabot University in Rome.
00:44Thanks so much for being with us on the programme.
00:47It had looked around this time last night, but Wilders had more or less conceded defeat following this election.
00:55The final results now, though, still uncertain.
00:58What are you expecting? How do you think this is going to fall?
01:04That's a very good question and one that's not that straightforward in terms of answering.
01:09For the most of today, we've been predicting that Rob Yetten of D66, which is this sort of social, liberal, progressive centrist party,
01:20had just beaten Geert Wilders' radical right populist party.
01:26And the logical assumption would be that he would be looking to form a coalition as Prime Minister.
01:35Over the last few hours, I think the electoral result was tightened and they're neck and neck.
01:41And it's not quite as straightforward as it was earlier in the day.
01:46I think the thing with the Netherlands is that we have a very pure system of proportional representation,
01:51which means that the number of votes cast is roughly represented across the country in the percentage of seats.
01:59And so we've got 15 parties who are going to be represented in the Dutch Parliament's 150 seats.
02:07But the biggest parties this time round, which, as we say, are D66, Rob Yetten and the Party for Freedom of Geert Wilders on the populist right,
02:18have polled around 17, 17 percent maximum.
02:23maximum. So whatever happens, looking at the maths in terms of the parties that have done well, i.e. got more than 10 percent of the vote,
02:33we're going to need at least four parties to get a majority coalition sorted out.
02:39Now, the mainstream parties, including D66 prior to the election, have said that they didn't want to work with Geert Wilders.
02:48Remember, he was responsible for pulling the plug on the coalition government earlier this year.
02:56So it's going to be a difficult one to work out what actually happens over the next few days and weeks.
03:03Remember that the last time we had the elections in 2024, it took almost seven months to get a coalition.
03:10If you were to ask me what I think is going to happen, I still think it's probably likely that Rob Yetten will become the prime minister
03:19and look to form a coalition of like-minded political parties from the centre-left, centre-right.
03:28There's a possibility that that could work.
03:30But, you know, it's still pretty uncertain.
03:32And this is often the way with Dutch politics, when you have such a proportional electoral system
03:37with so many parties represented and no party with anywhere near a clear majority.
03:44And, Nicholas, regardless of the final result, though, as you say, it's not clear yet.
03:48The country, is it fair to say, does appear to have swung back to the political centre.
03:54Wilders looks to be on course to lose about a third of the seats he secured last time round.
03:58Yeah, that's a fair point and one that we should discuss.
04:03You know, the Party for Freedom, the populist right party of Geert Wilders, has been around for a long, long time.
04:09And it kind of reached its electoral peak at the last election in 2024, when it polled 23% plus of the vote.
04:20And, you know, often we talk about the rise of the radical right as if it's just a kind of one-way traffic
04:25and the parties are doing well electorally and there's this great populist surge.
04:30But actually, when you look at a party like the Party for Freedom, ever since it was first getting representation
04:37in the Dutch Parliament in 2006, you know, it's been up and down in the electoral math.
04:43It's not been like, say, the Rassemblement National here in France, where there's been this kind of steady increase.
04:48And I think that it's difficult in a country that, you know, we know to be very liberal.
04:55It's difficult to kind of get beyond that glass ceiling of 100% for a populist radical right party, you know.
05:03And, you know, it looks likely that Rob Yetten, if he becomes prime minister, he's openly gay
05:08and he'll become the first gay prime minister if he does become prime minister in the history of Dutch politics.
05:15And, you know, remember that the Netherlands was the first country to legalise same-sex marriage globally in 2001.
05:24So it's a very progressive country in many ways.
05:27And that's something that I think Geert Wilders faces as something of a problem as he tries to build his electoral scores
05:36and has tried to build his electoral scores over the last 20 years.
05:40So it is a pushback. It is a setback for the radical right.
05:43You know, as you say, he's going to lose something like 7% of his electorate.
05:49And I don't think many people were necessarily predicting that.
05:54And he's not too well known outside the Netherlands.
05:57What kind of a leader do you think Rob Yetten will be if he does, as is predicted, become the next prime minister?
06:06Well, I think he's quite a dynamic leader.
06:09He's got, you know, a certain sense of charisma.
06:11I think one of the reasons he looks like he may well be the winning party is that he came across extremely well in the TV debates that took place during the election campaign.
06:22I think he's also been quite savvy about the policies that he wants to push.
06:27He's been pushing on the fact that, you know, housing is so expensive in the Netherlands, you know, particularly for the student community there.
06:34And I think he's tried to engage with the kind of Generation Z voters, those who are less than 25.
06:40And I think they will have voted for him in high numbers.
06:44He's pushed on things like green energy.
06:46But he's also talked about things that the populist right talk about.
06:51He's talked about, you know, trying to make asylum applications, you know, not necessarily more difficult, but trying to make them lodged outside of Europe rather than necessarily before they get to Europe.
07:04So he's kind of not been scared to take on some policies that we wouldn't necessarily associate with a kind of social, liberal, progressive, centrist party.
07:14And I think this combination of a quite a wide policy outlook, but also the fact that he's presented himself, you know, quite dynamically in the election campaign, I think has been the reason why he's probably going to be the leading party when the when the votes are all completely finished.
07:32I think we're about two percent away from finally all counted.
07:37What kind of prime minister, just to get back to your central question, you know, he's going to have to build consensus here.
07:43He's going to have to show that he's able to reach out to other political parties, whether it's the Christian Democrats appeal on the center right, whether it's the kind of Labour slash Green coalition on the left, whether it's the VVD, Mark Rutter, the former prime minister's old party.
08:01He's going to have to use some real power of diplomacy and coalition building to get, you know, a meaningful government coalition off the ground and one that can command a majority in the Dutch parliament where the four parties minimum in coalition can agree on a set of policies that can help move the Netherlands forward.
08:27Professor Nicholas Stine, thanks so much for being with us on the programme this evening.
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