Dutch coalition deal: The long road to a new right-wing Cabinet has taken 175 days

It took a negotiation of 175 days before the announcement on Wednesday that the far-right PVV had reached a deal to form a new Cabinet with the right-wing parties, VVD, NSC and BBB. The leader of the PVV, Geert Wilders, told reporters that they came to an agreement when talks ended three hours later than expected. The two people moderating the talks, Elbert Dijkgraaf and Richard van Zwol, had a firm May 15 deadline to bring this negotiating round to a close.

The leaders of the four parties began discussing the content of the coalition agreement with their political factions in Parliament soon after the announcement late Wednesday afternoon. Those conversations were expected to continue well into the night, but details about the coalition agreement should soon emerge. So far, only a vague collection of bullet points from a draft version of the agreement have leaked out.

The PVV, VVD, NSC, and BBB were considered the most likely coalition from the start and were the only parties to actually negotiate with each other, but the talks were far from smooth. Signs the talks were breaking down began in mid-January after the VVD said they would pass a law to mandate the fair distribution of asylum seekers across the Netherlands. This was followed by a period where party leaders lashed out at each other on social media, information leaked to the media, and the first attempt to form a right-wing Cabinet collapsed when NSC leader Pieter Omtzigt suddenly walked out on February 6.

The four parties later came back together for a month-long round of talks, under the leadership of Kim Putters, focused mainly on how these four right-wing parties could work together. The conclusion was an extra-parliamentary Cabinet—a long-cherished wish of Omtzigt’s—with the four party leaders not forming part of the new Cabinet but remaining in parliament. Wilders groused about the fact that he couldn’t be Prime Minister quite a bit in the months that followed, but the decision was made and the parties tried again to negotiate on content.

The new round of negotiations, led by Van Zwol and Dijkgraaf, also seemed on the verge of collapse multiple times. Wilders once stormed out of the asylum negotiations in April and quickly posted on X that he was done making concessions. Political reporter Marleen de Rooij speculated that this walkout was mainly a performance for the PVV voters. “He wants to show them that he is fighting for this issue, which he made the biggest promises about in the campaign, and why many people voted for his party.” And he did return to the talks without a fuss the next day.

Wilders’ social media posts also got on the VVD and NSC’s nerves. A week after his walkout, the PVV leader called VVD State Secretary Eric van der Burg (Asylum) a “scary little man” after Van der Burg called it great that the parties decided that Wilders wouldn’t be Prime Minister. Even BBB leader Caroline van der Plas, who held out the most hope of this right-wing Cabinet working throughout the formation process, said she was “very tired” of all the tweeting and talking about each other. “It’s not my way of tweeting, but Geert Wilders should know what Geert Wilders is doing.”

Formation leaders Van Zwol and Dijkgraaf were also reluctant to promise success until the very last moment, always stressing that nothing is certain and creating the impression that the talks could collapse at any moment. Even on Tuesday night, they said that the chance of a PVV, VVD, NSC, and BBB Cabinet forming has increased but is “not yet 100 percent.”