Dutch press agency calls election for centrist D66 party

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THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — The centrist D66 party will eke out a victory over anti-Islam lawmaker Geert Wilders’ far-right Party for Freedom in the Dutch national election, according to an estimation Friday by national news agency ANP.

The ANP prediction uses a count of nearly all of the ballots and an analysis of the remaining votes based on previous voting patterns. The remaining votes are mostly from Dutch nationals living overseas who vote by mail.

The ANP projection means that D66 party leader Rob Jetten is likely to be the country’s next prime minister. He told reporters on Friday the results show that voters want an end to “political nonsense.”

The 38-year old would be the country’s youngest and first openly gay leader.

Jetten will begin discussions next week to appoint a scout, an official chosen by the winning party to look into possible coalitions.

It is not yet clear whether D66 or Wilders’ party, known by its Dutch acronym PVV, will have the largest number of seats in parliament. The two are currently tied at 26, but it is possible the remaining votes could push D66 to 27.

To determine who gets seats, the electoral commission adds up all the valid votes and divides them by the 150 seats. For example, in 2023, there were 10,432,726 valid votes, meaning that any party that garnered 69,551 or more got a seat.

Mainstream parties including D66 have ruled out forming a coalition with the PVV, arguing that Wilders’ decision to torpedo the outgoing four-party coalition in June in a dispute over migration underscored that he is an untrustworthy partner.

As a result, which party ultimately gets the largest number of seats is “completely and utterly irrelevant,” political scientist Henk van der Kolk told The Associated Press.

Van der Kolk sees a possible path forward with a centrist coalition of D66, the center-left bloc of the Labor Party and Green Left, the center-right Christian Democrats and the right-wing People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy.

In the splintered Dutch political landscape, forming a coalition is likely to take weeks or months.