PVV wins in Venray but loses ground as D66 keeps national lead

The long wait in Venray ended Friday as the final election results confirmed the PVV as the largest party in the Limburg municipality, with 5,277 votes compared to 4,105 for D66. Despite the local PVV win, D66 retained its lead nationwide after all Dutch municipalities completed their counts.

The PVV, led by Geert Wilders, saw its support in Venray drop sharply by 7.8 percentage points compared to 2023, finishing with 20.1 percent of the vote. D66 made major gains, rising from 5.6 percent two years ago to 15.7 percent. Across the country, D66 remains ahead of the PVV by 14,081 votes, according to official tallies.

The ANP Election Service had already projected earlier Friday that D66 would become the largest party nationally, based on prior voting patterns from Dutch citizens abroad. Those overseas votes, which will be counted early next week, are not expected to change the outcome. In 2023, more than 69,000 Dutch citizens abroad cast ballots, with D66 winning roughly 2,800 more votes than the PVV among them.

The count in Venray had been delayed after a fire broke out overnight from Wednesday to Thursday inside the town hall, where ballots were being processed. The building was evacuated and counting paused, but officials confirmed that the ballots were not damaged. Counting resumed Thursday.

CDA, JA21, and FVD also gained significantly in Venray, reflecting trends seen in many other municipalities. Nieuw Sociaal Contract (NSC) was the biggest loser in the town.

While D66 holds a narrow national advantage, PVV remains dominant in two of its strongholds: the Noord-Brabant village of Sint Willebrord and the Duindorp neighborhood of The Hague. In both areas, Wilders’s party once again secured an absolute majority, though support was slightly lower than in 2023.

Meanwhile, the Electoral Council rejected Wilders’s social media claim that the country’s election software had been tested by a company linked to D66. “The current version of the Ondersteunende Software Verkiezingen was pentested by Fox-IT,” the Council said in a post on X. “And not by Hackdefense B.V., which has ties to D66, as Wilders claimed.” A pentest — short for penetration test — is an authorized security check in which ethical hackers try to breach systems the same way malicious hackers would, to detect and strengthen weaknesses.