The far right PVV slips badly in Dutch parliamentary elections 🇳🇱
The extremist PVV led by anti-imigrant firebrand Geert Wilders lost 11 seats in the lower chamber (called the Tweede Kamer) of the Dutch parliament.
The biggest winner was the D66 (Democraten 66) party led by Rob Jetten which gained 17 seats. Both the PVV and D66 now have 26 seats in the 150 member Tweede Kamer.
With 99.7% of the votes counted, here is where the parties now stand.
No party has had a majority since the Tweede Kamer was expanded to 150 in the mid 1950s. So it can take weeks or even months to put together a coalition which adds up to a 76 seat majority.
One possibility is a coalition which includes the VVD, CDA, GL/PvdA, and D66. All are pro-democracy and in the European mainstream. Together they would have 86 seats – a comfortable majority.
As leader of D66, Rob Jetten is in a good position to become prime minister. Jetten would probably not be Donald Trump's favorite foreign leader. 😛
From POLITICO...
Once dubbed “Robot Jetten” because of the clunky manner he answered questions, Jetten is now in pole position to become the future prime minister of the Netherlands. Despite the unfavorable early nickname, the 38-year-old — who is openly gay — has since become a charming and media-savvy poster-boy for D66’s positive and progressive-liberal platform. [ ... ] Jetten will have to form a coalition and, to get the numbers for a majority, may need to carry out the unenviable task of convincing the center-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) and left-wing GreenLeft-Labor to team up after bitterly campaigning against one another. The challenge isn’t lost on Jetten. With around 26 seats, D66 is “a small large party, when compared with Dutch history,” he said on election night. “So we’ll have to cooperate with many parties.”
So Jetten is a gay, moderately progressive, pro-EU millennial whose English is more comprehensible than Trump's.
Trump will be even more perturbed when he learns that D66's election slogan "Het kan wél" is roughly the Dutch equivalent of Barack Obama's slogan "Yes we can".
This election counters the narrative that populist far right rule is an inevitability. When the forces of democracy unite, they win.
SOURCE: Election stats and graphics are from NOS, a public broadcaster in the Netherlands.
