Higher voter turnout fuels tight race between PVV and D66; Major Amsterdam count pending

Voter turnout remains high in the Dutch parliamentary election, with nearly all votes counted showing a razor-thin lead for the PVV over D66. After Helmond’s results were processed Thursday morning, the PVV led by only 1,984 votes.

Large portions of ballots are still uncounted in several areas, most notably Amsterdam, where 20 percent of votes—over 86,500 ballots—have yet to be processed. The municipality expects to release the complete results Friday evening.

Mail-in ballots from abroad could further influence the outcome. A total of 136,272 Dutch citizens registered to vote by mail, though the exact number of votes cast remains unknown. The Hague is handling the processing of these ballots.

Other regions also remain incomplete. Epe, Venray, and the Caribbean islands of Bonaire, Saba, and Sint Eustatius have yet to report, while Almere and Hilversum still have about four percent of votes uncounted in preliminary figures.

Past election trends highlight local differences in support. In Venray, the PVV was the largest party in the previous election, while D66 led on the three Caribbean islands. In Amsterdam, D66 currently holds 23.4 percent of votes in interim results, trailing only the GroenLinks-PvdA coalition. PVV support in the capital remains low at 7.3 percent.

Mail-in voters previously favored GroenLinks-PvdA, giving D66 10.5 percent and PVV 6.3 percent of these ballots in the last parliamentary election.

In the previous parliamentary election in November 2023, the turnout was 77.7 percent. Nearly 10.5 million of the around 13.5 million eligible voters cast their ballots. The turnout for the 2021 election was even higher at around 78.1 percent.