Members of the right-wing liberal VVD are bracing themselves for a hard landing at the general election in three weeks’ time, with polls indicating the party is on course for its worst result for 50 years.

The party which won four elections in a row under Mark Rutte has been in decline since the prime minister resigned in July 2023, and despite a brief recovery in the first half of this year is now projected to finish fourth or fifth, with around 15 seats.

RTL Nieuws spoke to several influential figures in the party, some of them anonymously, who speculated about the future of party leader Dilan Yesilgöz and said they were resigned to a period of opposition and rebuilding.

Yesilgöz, a populist hardliner, was tipped as a potential prime minister during the previous election campaign two years ago. But she has come under fire for breaking the cordon sanitaire around Geert Wilders’ far-right PVV party, which helped propel Wilders to an unprecedented 37 seats while the VVD dropped from 34 to 24.

Campaign strategist Henri Kruithof told RTL: “It went wrong when the VVD decided not to shut out the PVV from participation in a cabinet and chose asylum and migration as its election issue. That’s not a VVD issue, it’s a PVV issue.”

Antifa motion

More recently Yesilgöz has been criticised for backing a motion in parliament proposed by the pro-Russian far-right Forum voor Democratie to ban “Antifa” as a terrorist organisation, even though no such organisation exists.

Friso van Gruijthuijsen, chair of the party’s youth wing JOVD, told RTL it was “a competely unfeasible and undemocratic motion”. “We think it’s a massive shame that the VVD was tempted to vote for it,” he added.

Yesilgöz was instrumental in the fall of Rutte’s last cabinet, a four-way coalition of conservative and liberal parties, when the VVD and its partners could not agree on stricter asylum rules, including a temporary ban on family reunions.

After the election in November 2023 she took the VVD into a right-wing coalition with Wilders’ party, the newly formed conservative reformist NSC and the farmers’ party BBB.

Ratings halved

But the government, headed by non-partisan prime minister Dick Schoof, was beset by infighting and lasted just 11 months until Wilders pulled the plug in June.

Since then the VVD’s poll ratings have almost halved from 18% of voters to less than 10%, and some party members are speculating that it could end up with as few as 10 seats.

One anonymous member told RTL there was a “power vacuum” at the top of the party, while another said it was being run “like a family business rather than a members’ party”. A third said: “Who’s going to tell Dilan it’s over?”

Since the Tweede Kamer was expanded from 100 to 150 MPs in 1959, the VVD has never won fewer than 16 seats, and since 1972 it has always won at least 22.

Kruithof said Yesilgöz’s departure was inevitable if the VVD performed as badly as polls suggest.

Senior figures such as finance minister Eelco Heinen, defence minister Ruben Brekelmans and caretaker economic affairs minister Vincent Karremans have been touted as potential successors, but Kruithof said: “They wouldn’t be right in the head if they took over straight away.

“They’ll need to restore calm in the party first, so it would be better to have an interim leader and let the real new leader step forward afterwards, once order has returned to the party.”