The Dutch Left Had Its Worst Performance Ever

And the far right will get what they want anyway:

First, after the October 29 vote, the core trio of far-right parties — PVV, JA21 (Conservative Liberals), and Forum for Democracy — hold forty-two of hundred fifty seats. In 2023, they held forty-one. Wilders’s party lost eleven, yet JA21 jumped from one to nine and Forum rose from three to seven. In total, they control nearly one-third of the 150-seat parliament. This reshuffle is mainly tactical: once every mainstream party said it would refuse to govern with Wilders, many hard-right voters simply parked their ballot with JA21 or Forum, instead of abandoning this kind of politics altogether.

[…]

The historically more radical-left Socialist Party adopted the opposite pose as the GreenLeft-Labor alliance. It tried to copy the playbook of Germany’s Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance: talk tough on borders while hankering after a lost social democracy. This may have seemed a viable strategy, since the far right predictably failed to deliver on its pro-welfare promises. But voters are used to governments of all stripes failing to deliver on bread-and-butter economic issues. So those attracted to the anti-immigration message stuck with the familiar far-right narrative — which the Socialist Party helped legitimize. Progressives and voters with a migration background just turned away.

D66, the Dutch left-liberal party, has made a sharp turn on asylum migration, demanding that asylum applications are made from outside Europe’s borders.

Party leader Rob Jetten said he wanted a change of international treaties and pushed forward what he called “the Canadian model” as an alternative to the current policies.

He said “the parties of the middle should take a step forward” to prevent, he said, the subject taking national politics hostage again.

“The current migration system is broken,” said Jetten. “From migration that happens to us, we will have to move to migration that we control ourselves.”

Under the Canadian model, all asylum applications would have to be requested outside the borders of the European Union, meaning asylum seekers who applied in the Netherlands would not be allowed in.

https://brusselssignal.eu/2025/06/dutch-d66-party-calls-for-stricter-asylum-policies/

Same fucking bullshit everywhere: Centrist parties winning after scandal and failure by right wing or far right party in government celebrates as if it’s some return to normalcy, when actually they increasingly adopt far right policy, rhetoric and framing, especially on immigration. At best they try to soft sell it through triangulation and borrowing vaguely progressive sounding buzzwords.

Meanwhile, no actual meaningful decline in the far rights share of the vote and party representation, and the perfect stage for a one term centrist government as people swap between far right parties and liberals continue to flounder and take for granted their own voters as having “nowhere to go” as they shift right.

It happened with Biden, it’s happening with Keir, and it’s the perfect setup to happen in the Netherlands.