Rob Jetten’s Dutch centrist liberal party wins neck-and-neck election race, vote analysis says

The Dutch centrist liberal party of Rob Jetten has won Wednesday’s neck-and-neck election race, according to vote analysis indicating it cannot be beaten by anti-Islam populist Geert Wilders.

Jetten’s D66 currently has a narrow lead of 15,000 votes over Wilders’ Freedom Party, and Dutch news agency ANP says even though the vote count is not complete, Wilders can no longer win.

Jetten, 38, said he was “very proud of this historic result”, adding that he now had a great responsibility to form a stable government.

Projections from almost 99% of the vote put both parties on 26 seats in the 150-seat parliament – but ANP says Jetten’s centrists could win a 27th seat.

Wilders had led opinion polls going into Wednesday’s election, but Rob Jetten succeeded in winning in some of the main Dutch cities including Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht with a positive campaign using a catchphrase of “Yes, we can”.

Until now he had been careful not to declare victory until all votes were in, but ANP said based on figures from postal voters abroad he could now be declared the winner.

Jetten told reporters that his party had “shown to the rest of Europe and the world that it is possible to beat the populist movements if you campaign with a positive message”.

Although his path to forming a coalition is not straightforward, he is tipped to become the youngest prime minister in modern Dutch history.

Jetten said after the vote that never before had a party won a Dutch election with fewer than 30 seats.

He will need the support of at least three other parties to gather the 76 seats needed to form a coalition. The most obvious candidates would be the conservative-liberal VVD, the left-wing Labour (PvdA)-GreenLeft alliance and the Christian Democrats, but it could take months if that is to happen.

Outgoing Prime Minister Dick Schoof predicted on Friday that Jetten’s task would prove complicated. “I reckon I’ll still be prime minister at Christmas – I’d be surprised if it happened [by then]”.

Schoof, a former chief of Dutch intelligence, was picked for the top job by Geert Wilders, who abandoned his hope of leading the country because his prospective coalition partners would not support having a far-right prime minister.

Wilders won the last election in November 2023, and a government was only formed in July 2024. Eleven months later, he brought his own government down, in a row with his coalition partners over asylum and migration policy.