If there were any lingering doubts about whether the Dutch election campaign has begun, last week’s feisty exchanges between Dilan Yeşilgöz and Frans Timmermans ought to have dispelled them, writes Gordon Darroch.

At the recent VVD party conference in Nieuwegein, Dilan Yeşilgöz attacked the left-wing alliance of GroenLinks-PvdA as elitist and out of touch with its voters. She suggested that an “extremist” faction of GroenLinks voters had stolen the soul of the old working-class Labour party (PvdA) and dragged it away from the centre ground to the “radical left” fringe.

GroenLinks-PvdA Frans Timmermans, for his part, said the differences between the parties were irreconcilable and accused Yeşilgöz of creating a caricature of GL-PvdA’s supporters. In a debate on defence spending, he said the VVD had “opened the door to Putin’s friends” – a reference to the failed coalition with Geert Wilders’s far-right PVV, which was unashamedly pro-Russian prior to the invasion of Ukraine.

The pair had clashed in parliament in the first debate after Wilders pulled the PVV out of the cabinet, when Timmermans took Yeşilgöz to task over the right-wing cabinet’s track record. “Your cabinet achieved absolutely nothing,” he said, to which Yeşilgöz retorted: “Absolutely nothing would still have been better than Mr Timmermans’ plans for the Netherlands.”

Yet significantly, neither party has ruled out forming a coalition with the other after the election on October 29. And since both have categorically said they will not enter a partnership with the PVV, even if Wilders’ gamble pays off and his party remains the biggest parliamentary group, they may well be left with no alternative.

Voting patterns can shift dramatically in the fragmented Dutch landscape – just look at how Wilders surged from fourth place to first at the end of the 2023 campaign – but on current polling both parties are set to win around 25 seats.

The electoral arithmetic would then force them to to team up and find at least one other coalition partner – most likely the Christian Democrats (CDA) – to have any chance of forming a cabinet with a working majority.

It may seem natural to political commentators for parties to accentuate their differences four months out from an election campaign, before reconciling once the votes have been counted. But by branding GL-PvdA as radicals, extremists and anti-Semites, Yeşilgöz is engaging in the kind of flamethrower rhetoric that makes reconciliation painful and difficult, at a time when public trust in politics is steadily declining.

Slinging playground insults across the parliamentary chamber also sits squarely at odds with the VVD’s proclaimed desire for “mature leadership”, both in the Netherlands and in Europe, in the face of global instability.

Unreliable partner

Yesilgöz denounced Wilders as an “incredibly unreliable partner” after he walked out of the coalition, but refused to express remorse for her part in the whole doomed enterprise or acknowledge that she had cleared the path for the radical right’s election victory by removing the blockade that Mark Rutte had maintained since Wilders pulled the plug on his first government in 2012.

Together with the other surviving parties in Dick Schoof’s cabinet – NSC and BBB – the VVD have pledged to press on with implementing as much of the coalition agreement as they can until the next cabinet takes office, which could be a year away.

Yet to succeed, they will have to court the votes of GL-PvdA and other opposition parties, especially in the senate, where the coalition never had a majority. So the next four months are likely to be dominated by an increasingly tiresome public mudfight between two parties who, in practical terms, cannot live without each other.

Wilders’ hands

All of this plays into the hands of Wilders, who thrives on distrust and has wasted no time in framing the election campaign as one in which Yeşilgöz is secretly courting a partnership with Timmermans behind the scenes. By polarising the debate with Trumpist references to the “radical left” while relying on GL-PvdA’s votes to pass the caretaker government’s laws, she has effectively accepted Wilders’ terms and boosted his chances of another electoral coup.

The VVD has become so paralysed by the fear of shedding votes to the right that it would rather sacrifice what remains of its credibility as a responsible party of government than alienate Wilders’ base.

The justice minister, David van Weel, almost visibly squirmed when a vigilante gang set up illegal checkpoints to flag down cars crossing into the Netherlands from Germany and inspect them for signs of “dark-skinned people”.

Instead of condemning the sinister racist stalker squad, Van Weel expressed sympathy for their “frustrations” and timidly asked them not to take the law into their own hands. Wilders, of course, gleefully praised the “fantastic action” and suggested he might join in next time. The leader of the mob has since been arrested for impersonating an official.

Happy ending?

In the movie When Harry Met Sally, Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan’s characters spend eight years circling each other and scoffing at any suggestion that they might work as a couple.

The enjoyment for the viewer is in realising from early on that they are destined to get together and watching their increasingly unconvincing efforts to repel the inevitable.

Over the next four months Binnenhof watchers can look forward to an amateur dramatic society’s production of When Harry Met Sally, only with a heavy dose of cringe. It would be entirely fitting if the two main protagonists stepped up onto a stage together after the election to the strains of It Had To Be You.