The centrist D66 party won the knife-edge Dutch election, local news agency ANP projected Friday, saying its vote tally showed far-right leader Geert Wilders could not close the gap.
That would put D66 leader Rob Jetten on track to become the youngest leader of the European Union’s fifth-largest economy but lengthy coalition negotiations lie ahead.
ANP’s projections were immediately cited by multiple Dutch news outlets, including public broadcaster NOS.
With just one constituency and overseas postal votes still to be counted, Jetten holds a razor-thin lead of 15,155 votes over Wilders.
The postal votes are already being counted in The Hague but the result will not be announced before Monday evening at the earliest.
Expats have historically broken for more centrist and left-wing parties. At the last election in 2023, D66 outscored the PVV by nearly 3,000 postal votes.
On Tuesday, top politicians will come together in parliament to elect a so-called “scout”, who will sound out parties to see who is prepared to work with whom.
The leader of the party with the most votes picks the scout and takes the lead in the arduous coalition-building process, which will last several months.
Until then, caretaker Prime Minister Dick Schoof remains in charge. “I expect I will still be PM at Christmas,” he said earlier Friday.
All parties have excluded Wilders, who torpedoed the last coalition by pulling out the PVV in a row over immigration.
If confirmed as election winner, Jetten must form a coalition of like-minded parties with a majority of at least 76 seats in the 150-member parliament.
His main path to that appears to be a form of “grand coalition” with the centre-right CDA (18 seats), the liberal VVD (22) and the left-wing Green/Labour group (20). Jetten’s D66 party has 26 seats.
But there are question marks about whether the VVD and Green/Labour will work together.
VVD leader Dilan Yesilgoz said before the election an alliance with Green/Labour “would not work” and she wanted a centre-right coalition.
On Monday, the Green/Labour group will elect a new leader after former EU vice-president Frans Timmermans stepped down.
Yesilgoz and Timmermans are known to have a difficult relationship so a new Green/Labour leader could ease the path to a partnership.
Although Wilders saw support collapse, other far-right parties performed well.
The Forum for Democracy (FvD), a nationalist party that wants to withdraw from the EU’s Schengen system of open borders, more than doubled its vote.
It will have seven MPs in the new parliament, from three before. Wilders has ruled out working with them, finding them too extreme.
The hard-right JA21 party, which describes itself as a “conservative liberal party with a positive view of the Netherlands”, jumped from one seat to nine.
