The Dutch Election and the Illusion of the Moderate Centre

The enduring lesson of the 2025 Dutch elections is that the moderate centre, far from being a bulwark against extremism, has increasingly become the respectable front for the far right’s ideological advance. The results, hailed in some quarters as a stabilising moment after months of political turbulence, mask a deeper transformation in Dutch politics: the mainstream has not rejected the far right; it has absorbed its premises.

Rob Jetten’s D66 may have emerged as the joint-largest party, but its ascent has not reversed the rightward drift of Dutch political life. Instead, its victory reveals how deeply far-right ideas have colonised the political centre, even when the centre appears to triumph at the polls.

For years, the Netherlands occupied an unusual place in European politics: a country with a longstanding liberal tradition but increasingly fertile ground for populist, anti-immigration rhetoric. The collapse of the previous government, an unwieldy coalition that included the PVV and the agrarian BBB, symbolised the unsustainability of bringing the far right into formal governance.

But their removal from power has not diminished their influence. The PVV may have lost seats, yet the far-right bloc as a whole has grown, strengthened by JA21 and FvD, whose combined gains offset Wilders’ losses. What looks like defeat is merely dispersal; the far right has splintered but not shrunk.

This is where the illusion of the “return to the centre” becomes most dangerous. Jetten’s cheerful optimism, echoing Obama’s “Yes We Can”, was persuasive not because it offered a substantive ideological alternative, but because it grafted familiar, mainstream packaging onto positions that had already moved rightward.

D66’s willingness to adopt more restrictive positions on asylum procedures, including its striking embrace of externalisation outside the EU, marks a profound shift in the Dutch centre. Such policies would have been unthinkable from social liberals a decade ago, yet they now pass as pragmatic realism. The centre has not defeated far-right narratives; it has sanitised them.

The VVD’s trajectory only reinforces this broader metamorphosis. Under successive leaders, the party has repeatedly flirted with far-right positions, first by opening the door to PVV collaboration, then by co-sponsoring motions with JA21 and supporting measures targeting left-wing activism. Dylan Yeşilgöz’s insistence during the campaign on forming a right-wing government was not an aberration but the culmination of a long-standing ideological convergence. Even parties that now publicly exclude the PVV from coalitions do so less out of moral opposition to its policies and more out of procedural caution: Wilders has twice brought down governments he joined. The firewall around him is not value-based; it is logistical.

The election results reveal a paradox. The Netherlands has more far-right MPs than ever before, yet it is the centrist parties that increasingly articulate far-right frameworks on migration, identity, and national belonging. The traditional cordon sanitaire, not only against the PVV but against the political imaginaries they champion, has dissolved without fanfare. Europe’s political vocabulary has long warned of the dangers of “mainstreaming” extremism; the Dutch case shows what happens when mainstream parties internalise these ideas as sensible, even responsible, governance.

At stake is not merely the composition of the next coalition but the terms on which politics itself is conducted. The Netherlands stands at a critical juncture in Europe: home to one of the world’s most influential semiconductor industries, a key player in EU fiscal debates, and a potential anchor for Europe’s defence architecture.

Yet its strategic future depends on a political class willing to embrace openness, skilled migration, fiscal flexibility, and stable leadership, all of which are anathema to the far-right worldview the centre is increasingly reluctant to confront head-on.

If Jetten succeeds in forming a centrist coalition with VVD, CDA, and GL-PvdA, he will inherit not just a fragmented parliament but a political culture already shaped by years of accommodation to far-right pressures. His government may aspire to restore Dutch leadership in Europe, but it will do so within a landscape where the boundaries of what is politically sayable and politically possible have shifted rightwards. If, instead, the VVD insists on including JA21, the far-right’s policy influence will only become more explicit. Either way, the ideological terrain has been remapped.

That the Dutch far right did not win the election is less important than the fact that their worldview has permeated parties that claim to oppose them. The true danger for Dutch democracy, and for Europe more broadly, is not a far-right takeover but the quiet hollowing out of centrist liberalism from within. When the centre begins to speak the language of the far right, even in moderated tones, voters are left to choose between the original and the imitation. The former will always feel more authentic.

The Netherlands now faces a critical choice: whether to rebuild a political centre grounded in democratic norms, rule of law, and social openness, or to continue sliding toward a centrist veneer masking a rightward ideological shift. The latter path may deliver short-term coalitions, but it will erode the long-term foundations of Dutch democracy. The lesson of this election is not that the centre has prevailed, but that it has become porous, absorbing and legitimising the very forces it claims to contain.

In that sense, the Dutch election offers a warning to Europe: a moderate centre that mimics the far right will not neutralise it. It will empower it, respectably, incrementally, and with the full blessing of the political mainstream. The Dutch election also holds an uncomfortable mirror to India.

Just as the far right in the Netherlands has shaped the political vocabulary of the centre, majoritarian narratives in India have redefined what now counts as “mainstream.” Parties that once positioned themselves as secular or centrist have begun echoing the language of cultural grievance and national security to appear electorally viable. The line between moderation and mimicry has blurred. The lesson from the Netherlands is that the erosion of pluralism rarely begins with open extremism. It begins when the centre convinces itself that co-opting intolerance is the price of political relevance.

Vignesh Karthik KR is a postdoctoral research affiliate in Indian and Indonesian politics at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, Leiden.

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