Voter turnout in Dutch election hits 38%, as votes abroad given to GroenLinks-PvdA & PVV

Roughly 38 percent of the 13.4 million eligible voters in the Netherlands had cast a ballot in the General Election by 3:45 p.m. on Tuesday. The election gives voters the chance to choose one politician out of 1,166 candidates from 27 different political parties to serve as their representative in the Tweede Kamer, the lower house of Parliament. There are 150 seats up for grabs in the election.

The national voter turnout started off slightly lower than the previous election two years ago. By 3:45 p.m. in 2023, a total of 40 percent had cast a ballot. That two percent gap was similar to the tally at 10:30 a.m., when survey firm Ipsos I&O estimated that voter turnout was at 12 percent, compared to 14 percent in the last election. At 1:45 p.m., roughly 27 percent had voted, compared to 28 percent two years ago.

One question considered earlier this week was the potential effect of predicted wind and rain. Storms were likely to begin to hit the country from out of the southwest starting around 4 p.m., becoming more persistent and severe by 9 p.m., when the polls close.

There were some signs that more voters in the big cities cast a ballot in this year's election. Utrecht announced that half of the city's 266,000 registered voters had cast a ballot by 4:12 p.m. That was nearly 30 minutes better than in 2023, when about half of the electorate in the fourth-largest city had voted by 4:40 p.m.

Voter turnout in The Hague reached 41.5 percent by 4 p.m., and the figure climbed to 42.4 percent in Eindhoven. Both cities were trending a bit better than previous years. More than 148,100 voters marked their ballots in The Hague, and 69,500 did the same in Eindhoven.

While early voting was strong in Rotterdam, that began to taper off a bit after noon. An estimated 167,700 people cast a ballot by 4 p.m., bringing the turnout rate in the second largest city to 36.4 percent. The city saw a surge in ballots cast after normal office hours during the 2023 election.

The City of Amsterdam provided very little insight into early balloting data, saying that 27.6 percent of eligible voters put their ballots in a box as of 1 p.m. During the previous Tweede Kamer election, that figure sat at 23.3 percent. Updated figures from Amsterdam were expected at the end of the afternoon.

Meanwhile, a survey of Dutch voters abroad indicated that about 20.2 percent of them voted for the left-wing alliance party, GroenLinks-PvdA. Roughly 18.5 percent of the 12,000 respondents chose far-right nationalist party PVV, with centrist party D66 taking 17.2 percent. The three parties were polling very closely in the Netherlands, with Ipsos I&O indicating any of the three could win a plurality of votes cast domestically.

The survey of voters abroad was carried out by the Nederlandse Vereniging, an online magazine for the Dutch diaspora. About 9.8 percent of respondents said they support the VVD, and 8.2 percent sent their vote to the CDA.

Some 136,272 Dutch people living abroad are eligible to take part in Wednesday's election, with votes counted by workers in The Hague. Nearly 27,000 more eligible voters were abroad when the voting process began, when compared to the 109,436 who were able to take part in the 2023 election.