Netherlands Election Shock: Center Rises, Far Right Falls

Netherlands CENTRIST surge Far right leaders lose ground the Netherlands just sent a message to Europe's extremes. With nearly all votes counted, The Centrist Party D66, funny name for a political party, and the far right Party for Freedom, led by Geert Wilders, finished in a tie each on 26 seats. This is a big setback for Wilders, who forced early elections and then lost 11 seats. Voters punished chaos and hard lines on migration and rewarded a calmer fix it campaign from D66 leader Rob Jetton. He promised practical answers on housing, managed migration and a pro Europe course, while most other leaders said they would not govern with Wilders. Coalition talks will be tough, but the momentum shifted to the center. In short, Dutch voters didn't just split the difference. They chose stability over spectacle and policies over provocation. The verdict now moves from the ballot box to the coalition table. So what's the real message here? There are limits to these hard right leaders around the world. Just preaching the message of keep out the foreigners, no more immigration, let's be tough and take care of our own first. This was a big setback for right wing forces in certainly in the Netherlands, but it could, and I want to stress the word could be meaningful across not only Europe, but in other democracies. So for those of you in the United States, a little bit different in the Netherlands, they don't just run for president. It's like most parliamentary systems where you have an election, people vote for their party, you add up all the members of parliament and you put together a winning coalition. If you win, if your party wins a majority, well, then you don't have to put together together a coalition, you just rule them. But no party yesterday got an outright majority. There was a tie between the current governing part, so they lost a lot of seats. The current governing far right party in the Netherlands, this new Centrist Democratic Party D66, gained a lot of seats. They are now going to have the ability to create coalitions with other parties, so they have a working majority. So in all, it hasn't been settled yet, but it's extraordinarily unlikely that Gert Wilders will be able to continue running a government there. So it's going to cause some head scratching and a lot of people thinking, where did he go wrong? Because many, many political leaders throughout Europe, and indeed around the United States, even in North America, have been following down this path for the last roughly decade of just go further right, go further right between tough on immigration, be tough, kick the immigrants out, kick the illegals out, has worked really? Well, it seems to have gone too far in the Netherlands. Now, let's not compare apples to oranges. This is a very different political system. It's not as personality centered because you don't just get to vote for the one person you like or don't like. Geert Wilders is a provocative character, and I have to say I sound like Trump now. He's got an incredible head of hair. I would flash it up here for you, but I don't have it right in front of me. And you can Google that. Those of you listening on podcasts, you wouldn't be able to see it anyway, but this guy. There is something about a lot of European politicians. I don't know what it is, and maybe I'm just jealous, but they tend to have these fantastic manes of hair that we in the United States don't really have that off. But that truly is an irrelevant thing. Excuse me for my indulgence there. The other interesting thing is Geert Wilders called these elections. One of the things that various parliaments have, whether it's Great Britain or elsewhere, is they actually give the power to the ruling coalition to decide when elections are. It's not just automatically on a set date every four years, the way they are in the United States. So they typically try to game the system, maybe juice the economy, put their finger in the wind and think, wow, what would be the best time to help us consolidate power if we had an election in the near future? So they can really gauge it. He called this election. Presumably he thought he had the upper hand. He thought things were going well and it didn't work. Did not work at all. So what does this really mean for the rest of democracies? Well, if nothing else, I think it does send a message of hope to centrist political actors and in democracies around the world that, yes, there can be changing tides. There can be a pendulum that swings one side to the other. It may be that this is the beginning of a pendulum swinging back to the center. After being far right in a lot of democracies for the last decade, I know there are in fact a lot of Democrats and centrists in the United States who look at this and think, okay, the whole world isn't going to hell in a handbasket. Now maybe there is hope. And they're going to be studying exactly how these candidates worked for this D66 party, the messages they used. And apparently it was about bread and butter issues, maintaining stability, not just continuing to bash migrants and immigrants. And so a lot of democracies around the world are going to be studying what this party did because they clearly did something right.