A Dutch center-left party appeared to be the biggest winner in national elections on Wednesday, a strong rebuke to the far-right party that had upended the politics of the Netherlands in the last election, according to exit polls.
The center-left party, Democrats 66, was projected to win 27 seats in the 150-seat House of Representatives, the largest share, followed closely by Geert Wilders’ far-right Party for Freedom, with a projected 25 seats.
For Mr. Wilders, it would amount to a loss of 12 seats in the House of Representatives.
“The voter has spoken,” Mr. Wilders wrote on social media shortly after the exit polls. “We had hoped for a different result, but kept our backs straight. We are more combative than ever and still the second and maybe even the biggest party of the Netherlands.”
With no party winning an outright majority, the next step is for Duch lawmakers to form a coalition, which could take months. It is still unclear who will become the next prime minister, though the leader of D66, Rob Jetten, seemed a likely possibility on Wednesday night.
Mr. Jetten spoke to a cheering crowd waving Dutch flags after the vote. “We succeeded,” he said. “Millions of Dutch people chose for positive forces and politics that looks ahead.”
For D66, which had gained momentum over the past two weeks, it is the first time in its 59-year history that it could become the country’s biggest political party. The election result would mean an increase of 18 seats in the House of Representatives.
The setback for the far-right party comes as politics have become polarizing in much of Europe. Voters across the continent are increasingly torn between starkly different political visions, with the fault lines often forming along issues like immigration, housing costs and crime.
Those were all major campaign topics in the Dutch election, with the housing market, immigration and health care polling as top issues in the weeks leading up to the vote.
The election was also in many ways a referendum on Mr. Wilders and his party. Mr. Wilders has said he wants to end immigration from Muslim countries, tax head scarves and ban the Quran. His party, known as the PVV, has also called for a halt to asylum.
In the last election, in 2023, the party won a startling victory, securing the largest share of the House of Representatives’s 150 seats. The results drastically changed the country’s political landscape and turned Mr. Wilders into an unavoidable force.
But he never became prime minister, lacking the support from his fellow lawmakers to form a right-wing government if Mr. Wilders insisted on becoming prime minister.
In July, Mr. Wilders withdrew his party from the governing coalition, saying it was stalling plans for what he promised would be the country’s “strictest migration policy ever.” That move precipitated the early elections, which were held three years ahead of schedule. On Wednesday night, Mr. Wilders told reporters that he did not regret that decision, even though his party suffered a big loss.
This time around, a vote for Mr. Wilders amounted to a wasted vote because the leaders of the other major parties had excluded him as a coalition partner before the elections, said Janka Stoker, a professor of leadership and organizational change at the University of Groningen. During the elections in 2023, the leader of the liberal party had opened the door to working with him for the first time in more than a decade.
By excluding the PVV, it will now fall to parties in the political center to work together to get the majority needed to form a government.
D66 has the ability to bridge the gap between the right and the left, said Simon Otjes, an assistant professor of Dutch politics at Leiden University. The party, he said, moved slightly to the right in this campaign.
Just because a center-left party seems to have won the largest share of the votes does not mean that it decisively beat populism, Professor Otjes said.
Other Dutch far-right parties seemed to gain much of the ground that the PVV had ceded, with two parties, JA21 and Forum for Democracy, poised to pick up 11 seats — nearly as many as Mr. Wilders’ party had lost, according to exit polls.
The Dutch political landscape is still splintered. But the outcome was noteworthy, especially considering what Professor Otjes called “populist clouds that are hovering over the rest of Europe.”
Mr. Wilders’s party has long been seen as focused on the issue of migration, which appealed to many voters. But more centrist parties have begun to put forward their own ideas for constraining immigrant flows, echoing a trend across Europe.
And many Dutch voters might have been looking for stability after several years of chaotic politics in the Netherlands.
Voters also delivered a setback to the left-wing bloc made up of the Green and Labor parties, which was expected to lose five seats in the House of Representatives. Frans Timmermans, resigned as the bloc’s leader on Wednesday night. “Better times will come,” he told a crowd.
“I think we expected more,” said Wobke van der Kolk, 71, a volunteer for the left-wing bloc. “The right has remained quite strong.”
“I want this country to function properly again,” said Gigi van Steenbergen, 48, who voted in Amsterdam on Wednesday. “I never used to be into politics,” she said, “but now I feel like it takes up 75 percent of my thinking time.”
In The Hague, voters echoed the sentiment. “It’s important that we become a decent, reasonable country again,” said Aaltje de Roos, a resident of The Hague, after she cast her vote for the bloc made up of the Green and Labor parties at the city’s Central Station.
Koba Ryckewaert contributed reporting from Rotterdam.
Claire Moses is a Times reporter in London, focused on coverage of breaking and trending news.
Jeanna Smialek is the Brussels bureau chief for The Times.
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