Rob Jetten knows that besting the right-wing Dutch firebrand Geert Wilders in an unexpected and closely fought election might end up being the easy part.
Now, the 38-year-old Mr. Jetten must wrangle squabbling parties to form a governing coalition — and then keep them working together to address the hot-button issues like immigration that helped bring Mr. Wilders’s party to power.
“Yes, you can defeat the populists,” Mr. Jetten said in a phone interview on Tuesday. “But if you want to do that for more than one election, you’re going to have to work very hard.”
If he manages to form a government, he will almost surely become the youngest and first openly gay prime minister of the Netherlands.
The narrow win promises to shake up a nation where the far right had become firmly entrenched. Mr. Wilders’s populist Party for Freedom became the largest Dutch party in the last election, in 2023, and polls had predicted that it would again come out on top.
Instead, Democrats 66, Mr. Jetten’s party, won the most votes.
Both parties are expected to have 26 seats in the 150-member House of Representatives, a gain of 17 seats for D66 and a loss of 11 for the Party for Freedom. But the party that receives the largest share of votes gets the first chance to try to form a governing coalition.
The result has captured the attention of the rest of Europe as an example of how a party from the political center might triumph over a popular right-wing politician even amid concerns about immigration, crime, housing and other divisive issues.
And at the center of the party’s victory was Mr. Jetten — a charismatic young leader who rocketed to prominence with a slick social media strategy, prominent television appearances and promises of optimism and progress.
Now, he will need to turn that momentum into action.
If he can’t, he may yet fail to become prime minister. In the worst case scenario, if no parties succeed at forming a government, new elections would be necessary.
“It’s going to be a long, difficult process,” said Elmar Hellendoorn, who has advised the Dutch government and is now at the Atlantic Council, a think tank.
While D66 won the most votes, the parliament is so divided that it will probably take at least four parties to govern.
The question is whether the same qualities that lifted Mr. Jetten and his party to the top at the ballot box will make him an effective leader. Even though the election was a blow to Mr. Wilders, far-right parties as a whole won about as many seats as they did in 2023, signaling that the movement remains strong.
And some of Mr. Jetten’s solutions — which made for good campaign slogans — may be hard to realize, including a plan to build 10 new cities to ease a severe housing shortage. Economists deemed that plan unrealistic and too cumbersome to solve a very immediate problem.
Mr. Jetten has been undeterred by the criticism. He ran on the slogan “It can be done,” deliberately positioning himself as a contrast to what he called the “negativism” of Mr. Wilders, who has in recent years dominated Dutch politics with his anti-immigrant and anti-Islam messaging.
The more upbeat message — and Mr. Jetten’s permanent smile — seemed to appeal to a nation rattled by two years of political instability under the far right.
“It’s his success,” said Sigrid Kaag, a former first deputy prime minister and a past party leader of D66.
He is also known for reaching out directly to critics. After his party’s campaign office at The Hague was vandalized during an anti-immigrant protest this fall, he appeared on a Dutch talk show and engaged in dialogue with a right-wing demonstrator who had been there. Afterward, he posted a picture of the two of them, arm in arm and holding beers, alongside a caption: “A good conversation. Also when you disagree. It can be done.”
A former local politician who was first elected to the House of Representatives in 2017 and who went on to serve as minister of climate and energy, Mr. Jetten did not start his political life as a natural showman. He once earned the nickname Robot Jetten for his tendency to respond to journalists’ questions by repeating the same rehearsed line.
But that has changed. Mr. Jetten began to dabble in TikTok in 2021, after fan-made video montages about a fictional romance between him and a fellow lawmaker went viral.
Over the past few months, Mr. Jetten leaned heavily into carefully produced and sunny social media posts laying out D66’s policy platforms.
Voters also got to know Mr. Jetten through Dutch television. He was featured in a broadcast news segment about his love story with his fiancé, the Argentine field hockey player Nicolás Keenan. And he appeared on “The Smartest Person,” a game show about general knowledge in which Mr. Jetten reached the final and finished third.
Brankele Frank, 38, who won the contest and spent many hours taping episodes with Mr. Jetten, said in a phone interview that the political leader was the same in real life as what people saw on television.
That positivity also appealed to voters.
“You could see his human side,” said Frits Hermans, 43, who voted for Mr. Jetten. “He’s just a nice guy.”
As it aimed to reach a wide audience, Mr. Jetten’s party borrowed themes from Barack Obama’s 2008 run. D66’s slogan, “It can be done,” echoed Mr. Obama’s “Yes we can.” And it emphasized the potential for growth through innovation and out-of-the-box solutions.
At the same time, the party dialed back some of its left-leaning positioning on immigration, moving toward the right in a bid to capture voters at the center of the political spectrum.
In June, D66 called for an immigration overhaul, arguing that people should apply for asylum while they are still outside the European Union, instead of being allowed to apply once they have arrived in the Netherlands.
Dutch people “just want to decently host people fleeing war and violence, but also be strict with the rotten apples who ruin the system,” Mr. Jetten said in a televised debate. He added that asylum policy should be “strict but humane.”
That is far from the inflammatory rhetoric used by Mr. Wilders and the far right, but also much less accepting than the tone previously coming from the Dutch left.
Mr. Jetten has faced some criticism for the political shift.
When Frans Timmermans — who resigned after his left-wing party lost five seats last week — publicly congratulated Mr. Jetten on election night, he called D66 “a democratic party with a progressive slant.” But Mr. Timmermans added that “it moved a bit too much to the right.”
Mr. Hellendoorn of the Atlantic Council said, however, that the shift could help explain how, even in the fragmented Netherlands, a moderate party managed to eke out a win.
“It’s very smart for a centrist, liberal party to broaden its base,” he said.
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.
The post TikTok and Optimism: How Rob Jetten Won Over the Netherlands appeared first on New York Times.
