Dilan Yesilgöz has been selected unopposed to lead the VVD’s list of candidates for the general election.

No other candidates came forward before the deadline set by the party leadership of Sunday.

VVD chairman Eric Wetzels confirmed Yesilgöz’s nomination “with great pleasure” in a statement on the right-wing liberal party’s website.

“We are going into the election with a leader who knows what is needed to make the Netherlands freer, safer and more prosperous,” Wetzels said.

It is the second general election for Yesilgöz, 48, since she succeeded Mark Rutte as party leader in August 2023, again without a contest.

She was justice minister in Rutte’s last cabinet, but did not take a ministerial post in Dick Schoof’s administration after the four coalition party leaders all agreed to sit in parliament instead.

The VVD lost 10 of its 34 seats in November 2023, finishing as the third largest party behind Geert Wilders’s PVV and GroenLinks-PvdA, but went back into government as part of a four-way right-wing coalition headed by the PVV.

The latest peilingwijzer aggregate poll suggests the party would win between 24 and 28 seats, but it has been on a downward trend since Wilders pulled out of the coalition three weeks ago, triggering early elections.