Many coalition party voters regretting their choices

Many people who voted for one of the four coalition parties now regret their choice, but none more so than NSC voters. Three-quarters of the people who voted for Pieter Omtzigt’s party now wish they had made a different choice, Hart van Nederland reported after surveying 2,131 members of its panel.

A total of 40 percent of all eligible voters are disappointed with their choice now that they see what is happening with their votes. The regret is highest among people who voted for the coalition parties.

73 percent of NSC voters now wish they had voted for someone else. The same is true for 52 percent of BBB voters, 48 percent of VVD voters, and 42 percent of PVV voters.

There is a lot of dissatisfaction about the asylum compromise that the coalition parties agreed upon late on Thursday. Over a fifth of PVV voters think that leader Geert Wilders should have collapsed the Cabinet on this point.

The compromise itself has the Netherlands thoroughly divided. Of all Dutch voters, 47 percent support the compromise, 46 percent are against it, and 7 percent have no opinion. Of coalition voters, 54 percent are fine with the compromise, 40 percent are not.

The asylum measures individually all have majority support. The least popular of the 13 leaked measures, scrapping the Asylum Distribution Law before the end of the year, has 50 percent of voters behind it. The most popular measure is harsher punishment for convicted asylum seekers. 87 percent of Dutch people believe that they should be declared undesirable aliens and deported more quickly.

76 percent of Dutch also support not allowing family reunification for unmarried partners. Asylum lawyers have pointed out that this has always been allowed specifically for LGBTQIA+ asylum seekers, many of whom fled persecution in countries where they are not allowed to get married.

There is also broad majority support for reducing the period of a residency permit from five to three years (75 percent), not allowing adult children to come to the Netherlands under family reunification (74 percent), and building up to 100 extra cells for asylum seekers who have exhausted all legal remedies (73 percent).