Far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders staged a shock victory in Wednesday’s elections. Now he has to work out if he can govern.
After collecting 37 seats, according to the provisional vote-count — a healthy 12-seat lead over his nearest competitors — he needs to convince those other parties to support his prime ministerial ambitions. Coalition talks are scheduled to start on Friday, two different parties’ officials told Bloomberg.
Wilders’s rivals will spend Thursday huddled with their members of parliament to take stock of the results and strategize before meeting with rivals the following day, the people said.
The Netherlands’ fragmented political landscape means parties can’t rule without forging coalitions. Wilders said in a speech after the exit polls that he will look to other right-wing parties in order to drag the parliamentary math in his favor. None of the three right-of-center parties he named have ruled out cooperating with him, and together they would have more than enough for a majority.
These include Dilan Yesilgoz-Zegerius’s center-right VVD, whose 13-year stint as the largest party in government has been ended by these results. Wilders is less likely to find common ground with the Left alliance which came second in the provisional tallies, and whose leader Frans Timmermans said before the election that he would be unwilling to work alongside the far-right lawmaker.
Though the talks have a clear start date, the end point is much more murky. After the last election, parties took 9 months to iron out their differences. That means that the outgoing government led by Mark Rutte could remain in place for some time. Rutte is scheduled to retire from politics once a successor has been decided.
Author: Diederik Baazil, Sarah Jacob and Cagan Koc
