Dutch elections show PR keeps power honest – and moderates win out in the end
PVV leader Geert Wilders responds to the results of the Dutch parliamentary elections, October 2025 (Credit: ANP /Alamy)
5 min read
Chapter one of the Netherlands’ experience with a populist party in government has drawn to a close.
Two years after Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV) swept into power at the head of a four-party coalition, voters have withdrawn its mandate and handed authority back to the centrist establishment.
Rob Jetten’s liberal Democrats 66 (D66) emerged from last week’s election as the largest party, edging out the PVV, which lost a third of its seats. Other familiar parties – the Christian Democrats (CDA) and the Labour–Green alliance (PvdA/GL) – also advanced, while two outgoing coalition partners – the Farmers’ Party (BBB) and the integrity-driven New Social Contract (NSC) – slumped. The country now begins the process of coalition formation, with a broad centrist alliance of D66, VVD, CDA and PvdA/GL the most likely outcome.
Under PR, accountability is collective and the bar to re-entry is high
Critics were quick to predict chaos from the radical-looking 2023 coalition: three untested parties with conflicting ideologies and no experience of government. Yet, in classic PR fashion, it captured the national mood almost perfectly: frustrated, fragmented, and desperate for delivery.
The PVV, BBB and NSC each embodied one strand of that impatience – integrity after the toeslagena4aire (childcare benefits) scandal, a rural voice in the nitrogen dispute, and tighter action around the perceived immigration crisis, respectively. Together they gave form to public anger.
But within nine months the alliance unravelled. Wilders’ insistence on an asylum freeze that breached both EU law and the coalition deal pushed his partners to block, and he pulled his party out. When voters returned to the polls last week, all three were punished – not for ideology but for their role in failed execution. Under PR, accountability is collective and the bar to re-entry is high: those who cannot govern together cannot govern at all.
But for defenders of first-past-the-post, the Dutch experience appears to be a gift – proof, they say, that proportional systems breed chaos and indecision. Six months to form a coalition, nine months of government, five months to campaign again, four to rebuild: what kind of democracy spends half its time in limbo? To them, this is the fatal inefficiency of PR: all process, no delivery.
Yet that ‘downtime’ is the price of something far more valuable: discipline. The pauses and resets built into the Dutch system are not signs of drift but of design. What looks like paralysis from afar is, in truth, democracy’s self-correcting gear mechanism – what my paper for Compass explaining how PR systems tame the populist-right, The Temper Trap, called ‘structural friction’. It is the pause that prevents excess, the recalibration that keeps power honest.
The consequences of structural friction can look messy, with its prolonged negotiations and temporary power vacuums, but they save countries from the kind of overreach Britain has come to know too well. What would many in the UK have given for such a pause before the Conservatives drove through a hard Brexit on the back of the narrow 52-48 EU referendum vote? With a single-party majority, there were no brakes and no partners to test or moderate extremes.
In the Netherlands, by contrast, the attempt to push even a softened asylum plan – mild beside Britain’s Rwanda scheme – was enough to bring a government down. PR prevented an overreach that, under majoritarian rule, would have been sold as inevitability. Britain’s populist right, meanwhile, has never needed formal power to shape policy. As The Temper Trap set out, the Conservative Party absorbed it willingly through co-optation – the instinct to imitate rather than confront – where the survival of the party, not the needs of voters, dictated direction. Brexit, Rwanda and even Labour’s retention of the two-child benefit limit all flow from that same absence of friction. It is no coincidence that none of these extremes have emerged in peer democracies governed under PR.
But structural friction has played a far deeper role in shaping the Netherlands’ first dance with populism. It isn’t just what brought a coalition down as in May this year; it’s what shapes how one is built, managed and, when necessary, renewed. As the largest party in 2023, the PVV was given its democratic due, invited to lead, to negotiate and to broker compromise. It signed up to the red lines of its partners on Europe, immigration and Islam, and set to work.
But friction is not a single event – it’s a standing condition. When cooperation faltered, the mechanism triggered the reset. The system that let Wilders in has now, by design, shown him out peacefully, proportionally, and with public consent.
The populist right in the Netherlands is not dead but it has been domesticated. It was tested, contained and shown its limits. Now the Dutch centrist mainstream has a chance to govern competently, restore confidence and prove that moderation can deliver.
Across the North Sea, the outlook is darker still. Britain has already enacted what Wilders’ coalition partners prevented from ever reaching the Dutch cabinet table – Brexit, the retreat from net-zero, and Europe’s harshest migration policies. These were not negotiated into being; they were delivered outright through the co-optation of a fearful Conservative Party. And now the country stands staring down the barrel of a gun no proportional democracy would ever load: the prospect of a single-party majority for its populist right. No guardrails, no partners, no friction. Carte blanche.
While the Netherlands has absorbed its populists, Britain is about to be consumed by its own. If that’s the choice, the discipline of proportional democracy suddenly looks like a bargain.
Stuart Donald is a researcher, writer and Compass associate
