Rutte: Fear of Timmermans as new Dutch PM made VVD voters switch to far-right PVV

According to outgoing Prime Minister and VVD leader Mark Rutte, his party lost many voters to Geert Wilders’ PVV in the campaign's last days because they wanted to prevent Frans Timmermans (GroenLinks-PvdA) from becoming Prime Minister. “They were afraid that the social democrats would win the election,” Rutte said in a conversation with students at the Hertie School of Governance during a visit to the German capital of Berlin.

In the last 48 hours before the parliamentary election on November 22, VVD voters who didn’t want Frans Timmermans and the left-wing coalition GroenLinks-PvdA to become the biggest party looked at the polls and strategically decided to vote for Wilders instead of the VVD, Rutte said. “Not because they liked his program, but because they wanted to prevent Timmermans from becoming Prime Minister.”

It is the first time Rutte really spoke about the VVD’s loss of ten seats in the election. During his visit to Berlin, he met with Chancellor Olaf Scholz, visited the German Federal Council, and spoke with students at the Hertie School of Governance.

Rutte also addressed concerns about the PVV’s anti-EU stances. He stressed that Wilders and his far-right party got about a quarter of the votes in the election. That means that 75 percent of voters did not vote for him, Rutte said. And even many who voted PVV - the former VVD voters, for example - aren’t necessarily anti-EU.

So the outgoing Dutch Prime Minister is not worried about a possible Nexit, he said. “I think you could safely assume that if there could be a coalition with him part of that coalition, the coalition would still keep the Netherlands at the center of the European Union,” he said. “I am confident of that.”

The PVV won 37 of the 150 seats in parliament in the elections last month, up from 14 seats after the 2021 elections. The VVD lost ten seats, dropping to 24. Timmermans’ GroenLinks-PvdA got 25 seats in the Tweede Kamer, eight more than the parties had before the elections.

The Cabinet formation process has just reached the end of its first exploratory phase, with scout Ronald Plasterk presenting his report on his conversations with the party leaders to parliament on Monday. Plasterk said that there are many obstacles for a right-wing majority government of PVV, VVD, NSC, and BBB to overcome, but it is really the only option. “The country must be governed.”

The Tweede Kamer, the lower house of the Dutch government, will debate the report and the election results on Wednesday. The parliamentarians will likely appoint an “informant” to start the next phase of the formation process.