Less than a year after its inauguration, far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders pulled the plug on the first government that his party was allowed to fully participate in. It is a government that should never come into existence. The nicest thing one can say about it is that it accomplished nothing, but even on these generous terms it is a strong candidate for worst postwar Dutch government.
Wilders’s complaint is that his coalition partners kept him from implementing his preferred immigration policies. These include ending asylum and family reunification as well as stripping numerous dual citizens of their Dutch passports. The coalition agreement that Wilders and the other parties signed did not include these items, and the sudden rupture felt staged. My suspicion is that Wilders simply thought he would fare best in the next election if the government fell over an immigration policy dispute instead of a kerfuffle over a policy area that is less central or even detrimental to his national conservative brand, such as defense spending or budget policy.
Dilan Yesilgoz—the successor to now-NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte as leader of the center-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), decided in the summer of 2023 to take down the cordon sanitaire that had kept Wilders away from the levers of power since his anti-Muslim Party for Freedom (PVV) provided parliamentary support but not cabinet members to the first Rutte government, which lasted from 2010 to 2012.
This brought Wilders back from the utter irrelevance that he had spent the previous decade or so in, resulting in a surprise election win in November, where his party received 37 out of 150 seats in the House of Representatives—ahead of the VVD, at 24 seats, and the combination of the Green Left and Labor parties, which are in the process of merging into one party, at 25.
Dutch government is always coalitions, thanks to a proportional representation system in a country with numerous viable parties—15 parties won seats in 2023. While the largest party in the Dutch parliament typically leads the formation of the governing coalition and provides the prime minister, Wilders’s history of unhinged statements and policy proposals—including a criminal conviction for eliminationist rhetoric about Moroccans—complicated matters. Ultimately, the PVV was joined in government by the VVD, the populist pro-farmer Farmer Citizen Movement, and the New Social Contract (NSC) party.
The NSC had been founded just prior to the election by renegade Christian Democrat lawmaker Pieter Omtzigt, an econometrician with broad popular appeal thanks to his relentless oversight practices and despite a history of burnouts and temper tantrums. Omtzigt has spent much of his career pontificating about good government and religious freedom and had insisted throughout the campaign that he would not govern with Wilders. Predictably, that changed on election night. To preserve his brand, he insisted that the new coalition sign an agreement promising to respect the rule of law—definitely a sign of confidence in his new allies.
His coalition partners deemed Wilders unsuited for the position of prime minister, while various other candidates either declined or found themselves immersed in scandal. Ultimately, the new cabinet—installed in July 2024—would be led by Dick Schoof, a former senior civil servant and intelligence agency chief. Its announced policy agenda was lacking in detail by the standards of Dutch governments, but the contours reflected the four member parties’ priorities: fewer foreigners for Wilders, more nitrogen emissions for the farmers, constitutional hobby horses for Omtzigt, and more defense spending—plus continuity in fiscal and foreign policy—for the VVD.
Schoof and his ministers accomplished none of this—other than continuity in fiscal and foreign policy, which of course required mere preservation of the status quo ante. They passed no immigration legislation.
They also made no progress dealing with the nitrogen crisis—the country’s inability to control emissions of ammonia and nitrogen oxides. That crisis has paralyzed construction projects and economic development more generally—any activity associated with nitrogen emissions—for years now.
None of Omtzigt’s hobby horses—a constitutional court, a new electoral system, corrective referenda—have materialized. And the Netherlands spent the equivalent of 1.79 percent of its GDP on defense last year, still well below the old NATO target of 2 percent and far below the proposed new target of 3.5 percent.
What this doomed government did produce was a constant onslaught of scandals and other embarrassing episodes. Wilders’s lead negotiator and his first prime-ministerial candidate had to pull out amid accusations of fraud, bribery, and misappropriation of intellectual property. Wilders’s initial pick for deputy prime minister, Gidi Markuszower, was blocked by the intelligence services, allegedly for his work with the Israeli intelligence service. During the government’s first parliamentary debate, Markuszower’s replacement as deputy prime minister sent a tweet—from the government’s bench—undermining the prime minister’s defense of women’s freedom to wear headscarves. And just four months in, a deputy minister of Moroccan descent resigned while criticizing some of her cabinet colleagues’ hostile interactions with her.
The scandals continued for nearly a year while the government failed to actually do anything. The main thing that kept the coalition together for 11 painful and unproductive months was, ironically, its unpopularity. The Farmer Citizen Movement is polling at around three seats, down from its current seven; even two of its own senators recently switched parties; and the party had no ideological reason to walk, either. The NSC, the party with the most substantive concerns about the government, has seen its poll numbers collapse and will likely lose most if not all its 20 seats in the lower house in the next elections, which are scheduled for October. It had no incentive to trigger new elections as voters rapidly realized that this new party was not what they had hoped for.
The NSC had campaigned on a promise of good government, which may have been some kind of elaborate practical joke. It was also a party fueled almost entirely by Omtzigt’s star power. Unfortunately, as many observers had feared, Omtzigt was simply not up to the job. Mere weeks after the government was installed, budget negotiations between the four parties almost failed as his coalition partners struggled to manage Omtzigt’s screaming and crying.
Omtzigt temporarily left politics a month later, returned on a part-time basis in November, and quit politics in April. As my father recently told me about my parents’ votes for Omtzigt: “We have voted many times, but never this poorly.”
That leaves the PVV and the VVD. From the moment that the government was inaugurated, there were suspicions the VVD was simply waiting for the right moment to pull the plug and blame the collapse of the government on the PVV—ideally over an issue such as fiscal policy and the growing budget deficit. That moment never came.
Wilders finally had an opportunity to govern and is polling well below his 2023 results. Why, then, did he walk away? The conventional wisdom is that he wanted to preempt the VVD and make the government’s fall about immigration—his signature issue. Unlike the NSC, he still had many seats to lose in the polls, and his prospects were unlikely to improve if this utterly ineffective government continued.
I wrote last year that the purpose of the then-new Dutch cabinet was, first and foremost, to exist at all. It did, it shouldn’t have, and now it doesn’t. The Netherlands has gone through three experiments in government with the populist right since 2000, and each one has a been a miserable failure. The only such government that lasted for more than a year was Rutte’s first cabinet, which merely relied on Wilders’s confidence and supply, not his abysmal staffing decisions—and even that one fell after 18 months.
As Dutch election law places a heavy emphasis on the ability of new political parties (and overseas voters) to have ample time to register, Dutch voters will not go to the polls until late October. Their behavior in recent decades has been volatile, and it is difficult to predict what public sentiment will be like many months from now. Polling and haruspicy alike suggest that we will see the Christian Democratic Appeal, which dominated Dutch politics in the 1980s and 2000s, make a comeback. Many disappointed NSC voters will likely return to the party, which has a new leadership team that projects confidence, decency, and prudence.
After the events of the past two years, one might also think voters in the center or on the center-right will not place much trust in the VVD. Its leadership is more responsible than anyone—except perhaps for Omtzigt and Wilders—for the fact that by Election Day, the Netherlands will not have had a functional government for two and a half years.
Without Omtzigt around, another coalition involving the PVV is highly unlikely. After a week of hemming and hawing, even the VVD’s Yesilgoz indicated on Monday that she would not join forces with him again. The most likely outcome is a government formed by the VVD, the Christian Democratic Appeal, and the combination of Green Left and Labor.
A Christian Democratic Appeal-led centrist coalition may not be as exciting as yet another populist flavor of the day, but it stands a better chance of addressing the country’s serious challenges—in defense, housing, environmental, and immigration policy—than whatever this was.