PVV creeping ahead of D66 with 90.5% of votes counted; No change in seats

The PVV is creeping ahead of the D66 with 90.5 percent of votes counted on Thursday morning. The two parties are still neck-and-neck, with both projected to get 26 seats in parliament, but Geert Wilders’s far-right party is now 2,341 votes in the lead, according to data from ANP’s election service. However, many of the outstanding votes are from areas where the D66 traditionally scores better than the PVV.

Amsterdam still has 20 percent of its votes outstanding. The capital expects to share its full results by Friday evening. The results of the postal votes from abroad are only expected on Tuesday. A total of 136,272 Dutch people registered to vote from abroad. ANP is also still missing results from Venray and the Caribbean islands of Bonaire, Saba, and Sint Eustatius. Of these outstanding votes, the PVV only outscored the D66 in Venray in the past.

In the previous parliamentary election in 2023, the PVV came out as the biggest party in Venray. On the three Caribbean islands, the D66 held the lead. The D66 is also doing well in Amsterdam, holding 23.4 percent of the votes counted so far (up from 9.9% in 2023). The PVV has a much smaller share at 7.3 percent (down from 9.6%). Among postal voters, the D66 got 10.5 percent of the votes last election and the PVV 6.3 percent.

Despite being the largest party in the preliminary results, the PVV has so far lost votes in every municipality. So far, the populist party received the highest number of votes in Rucphen, Noord-Brabant, but it still lost 7.6 percent of the votes it received there last year. In Edam-Volendam, Wilders lost 14.4 percent of the votes.

Once the votes are in, the Cabinet formation process starts. Traditionally, the party with the most votes gets to take the lead. But even if that is the PVV, D66 leader Rob Jetten will likely make the first serious attempt to form a coalition.

The D66, VVD, GroenLinks-PvdA, and CDA have ruled out working with Wilders in a Cabinet. As the results now stand, a majority coalition is impossible for the far-right, populist PVV, even if it teams up with every smaller party, including the left-wing and pro-diversity ones.