🇳🇱 Politics and Elections in the Netherlands: General Election (Nov 22)

[Aurelius2]

Holy crap, this is wild. Love it.

[Aurelius2]

The deterioration and in some cases utter collapse of many of the worst (from my POV) parties in Dutch politics all across the political spectrum - CU, PvdD, FvD, SP, Volt, BIJ1 - is another nice touch.

[Aurelius2]

Don't like how FvD lost seats, bur Wilders is really good roo (apart from the zionism). European populist parties are often good because they're secular.

FvD lost seats because they used to be the Zemmour to PVV's Le Pen and now their leader has spent the last 2 years spouting insane nonsense about how 9/11 was an inside job, the moon landing is a hoax, and the world is run by reptile people.

[Aurelius2]

Even the SGP's infamously stable electorate had some strategic voting.

[Aurelius2]

Calvinist hellhole (Urk)
SGP 48.3% (-6.2)
PVV 25.8% (+12)
NSC 6.0% (new)
BBB 5.0% (+4.9)
CU 4.1% (-4)
CDA 3.7% (-4.1)
FvD 3.7% (-5.9)
VVD 0.9% (-0.8 )
GL-PvdA 0.7% (+0.2)

First time SGP under 50% here?

slow die-off of people, SGP are mostly people who vote for that their entire life.

No, this is because of strategic voting. If anything we can expect the SGP vote share to gradually grow over time due to their voters outbreeding the general population. I would not be surprised if they reach four seats by the end of the decade.

[Aurelius2]

Seems to me now that the exit poll projection of 50+ getting a seat is getting less and less likely to occur in reality....

aaaaand the exit poll got adjusted with their seat going to PVV

The impossible dream coalition of PVV+VVD+BBB+SGP+JA21 inches ever closer, yet it won't come close enough. Shame FvD had to go off the deep end - if they were an acceptable coalition partner a strictly right-wing coalition with no need for centrist parties might just barely be possible depending on what happens from here.

[Aurelius2]

The Extreme-Right option without NSC: PVV + VVD + BBB + FvD + CU + SGP + JA21. 76 seats right now, and obviously not every party would be in the cabinet. But this not only seems doomed to collapse after the EU elections, but also one wonders if parties like the VVD or CU would have issue with their supposed partners like FvD. Or if the minor parties would even want into government.

CU will not be willing to be in a coalition with PVV, and absolutely nobody other than PVV and maybe a few minor parties would be willing to be in a coalition with FvD. This also presupposes that FvD is interested in governing, which they are not.

[Aurelius2]

Hypothetically, what happens if a party wins more seats than the number of candidates they named on their list?

[Aurelius2]

The latest projections have the right-wing dream coalition (PVV+VVD+BBB+SGP+JA21) at a combined 72 seats, up from 70 at the initial exit polls, but still 4 short of a majority. I do not see them closing that gap.

[Aurelius2]

I know I'm a dumb American, but don't big-tent anti- (insert party here) coalitions generally seem to result in said party gaining ground? Like I know part of the reason FdI surged so much between 2018 and 2022 was because they were the only party always in the opposition.

I could easily see an anti-PVV coalition collapsing and Wilders getting 50 seats in the next election.

Yeah. If an unstable anti-PVV coalition takes power and things don't massively improve, Wilders will do insanely well next time around.
This is the same reason why the AfD doesn't necessarily present a threat in Germany yet, but if they do well enough to push every other party into a chaotic coalition, they would be the de-facto opposition and very likely do way better in the election after that.

Hot take time: my suspicion regarding Germany is that at some point push will come to shove and the AfD will split into two parties, der Flugel (the far-right Bjorn Hocke faction) and the rest of the party. The non-Flugel part will then break the cordon - they'll be the PVV to Hocke's FvD. The coalitions required to keep AfD out of government are just getting too weird and unstable for the status quo to continue indefinitely. At the same time, no one in their right mind will willingly coalition with a political movement as extreme as Hocke's faction, especially in a country like Germany where the shadow of history is especially heavy.

Right now if you're on the Right and not a neoliberal/libertarian (thus ruling out FDP), your only options (unless you're in Bavaria, where the FW are an option and where their CSU is a bit more right-wing thsn the CDU it substitutes for) are the CDU, which barely even makes a pretense of being right of center these days, and the AFD, which contains the single most extreme-right faction in western European politics. I don't see how this can (or should) hold.

[Aurelius2]

Also worth noting that Wilders has been quite tame about Islam for a while. First-time voters don't remember the 2006-2015 era that well because they were children, which affects their perception of Wilders. In the nationally organized mock elections in high schools all over the country, PVV came first and FVD second.

Can you post the link to the mock elections?

https://stem.scholierenverkiezingen.nl/uitslagen
You can also check results per province, per municipality, per city/town/village and per school

These are absolutely wild numbers. There were only 140,000 total votes countrywide, which seems very low. Did a lot of schools just not participate?

At least one of these three things is true:
1. only some schools participated
2. it was an opt-in thing for students and only a small fraction who actually care about politics bothered to participate
3. the young folks in the Netherlands are insanely right-wing compared to what you normally see from the youngs