Dilan Yesilgöz is gambling with the VVD’s future, writes Gordon Darroch, in an analysis of the party leader’s failings and self-claimed successes. 

“We’re going to party tonight.” That was the incongruous reaction of Dilan Yesilgöz to leading the VVD to its worst election result in 54 years. Johan Cruyff was still playing for Ajax when the right-wing liberal party last took less than 14.2% of the vote, which is where it landed last month.

Since Yesilgöz succeeded Mark Rutte just over two years ago the VVD has shed one-third of its seats across two elections. Things have got so bad at the party of fiscal prudence that it made a loss of €1.3 million last year and is openly considering a Socialist-style plan to dock its MPs’ wages so it can afford to host drinks parties again.

Yet Yesilgöz’s colleagues embraced her invitation to dance the night away on October 29, largely because she had snatched a narrow defeat from the jaws of humiliation.

Two weeks before polling day, speculation about Yesilgöz’s future was running through the party like a dose of cholera. The VVD was projected to win around 15 seats and drop to fifth place, behind the Christian Democrats, fellow liberals D66 and the left-wing alliance GroenLinks-PvdA. Yesilgöz took a calculated gamble, born in either cynicism or desperation.

She made an aggressive pitch to right-wing voters that she would block GL-PvdA and their leader Frans Timmermans from the next government. Only a “centre-right cabinet with a strong VVD” could stop the CDA and D66 ganging up with GL-PvdA to raise taxes, scrap mortgage interest tax relief and waste money on foreign development aid.

The gamble paid off: the VVD won 22 seats on election night and crucially finished ahead of both GL-PvdA and CDA in the running order, putting it in a much stronger position to make demands of D66. But it came at a heavy price.

Yesilgöz won votes from the PVV, with 9% of those who backed Geert Wilders last time switching to the VVD. But her party also lost a quarter of its votes to CDA and D66, as moderate liberals still bristling at Yesilgöz’s disastrous decision to share power with the PVV two years ago moved to the centre.

The outcome is twofold: the VVD’s voter base has moved towards the hard right – its manifesto was practically indistinguishable from JA21’s – and Yesilgöz is now pinned by her promise to shut GL-PvdA out of government. Rutte was always careful to leave enough room to change his mind if the situation demanded it, enabling him to form a solid cabinet with the PvdA in 2012 despite spending the election issuing dire warnings about the Labour party’s “red feathers“.

By contrast, Yesilgöz has doubled down since October 29, insisting she will not support a cabinet with GL-PvdA in any form, even a confidence and supply deal with a minority administration.

Back in March, when the VVD launched a pre-emptive election campaign, Yesligöz lectured the country at length on the need for “grown-up“ politics. She even ducked out of one of the innumerable cabinet crisis meetings to travel to Kyiv and thank President Zelensky for fighting for Europe’s freedom.

Toddler

Yet since the election she has behaved like a toddler at a playground football game, threatening to puncture the ball unless her best friend can be on the team. In the end D66 and CDA lost patience and decided to press on with the grown-up business of forming a government on their own, leaving Yesilgöz screaming on the sidelines.

Yesilgöz argues a “centre-right” cabinet, including JA21, is the only option that does justice to the perceived shift to the right by the electorate. The truth is more complicated: the net movement was caused not by centre-right voters drifting towards the fringes, but voters on the left moving towards the centre.

The two parties in the rump coalition, VVD and BBB, lost seats after publishing manifestos that adopted many of Wilders’ discriminatory policies towards Muslims. If Yesilgöz’s claim about the electorate were true it would cast her party’s performance in an even more damning light, since it would mean the VVD lost two seats despite having a political tailwind.

A storm blew up last week when one of the coalition negotiators was accused of calling Yesilgöz a liar. The comment later turned out to have been made by someone else, a journalist sympathetic to the VVD but exasperated at Yesilgöz’s campaign strategy.

Liar

The negotiator still had to resign after other ill-advised comments made in private app groups came to the surface. The word ‘liar’ is used with great restraint in politics, but the proportion of truth in some of Yesilgöz’s public statements would make a homeopathist squint.

The most infamous example was during the election campaign of 2023, when she claimed repeatedly that the asylum system was swamped by refugees manipulating the right to family reunion to import dozens of relatives from their multiple marriages.

The actual figures showed just 10 such applications had been made all year, but Yesilgöz persisted with her story about rampant chain migration for months. It was also the basis for the collapse of Rutte’s fourth cabinet, which Yesilgöz played a central role in as justice minister, paving the way for the right-wing coalition led by Wilders and Yesilgöz.

GL-PvdA

Her recent assertions that GroenLinks-PvdA has been hijacked by “radical elements”, making it impossible for the parties to work together, deserve similar scrutiny.

As Dick Schoof’s cabinet crumbled, the VVD increasingly relied on the support of GL-PvdA to get its bills through. When Wilders blocked a €3.5 billion aid package for Ukraine in March this year, Yesilgöz and Dick Schoof went knocking on the door of Frans Timmermans to get the votes they needed.

She knew she could rely on Timmermans because two weeks earlier the two party leaders passed a motion pledging “unstinting military, financial, moral and political support” for Ukraine, which Wilders also opposed. It was with the support of GL-PvdA during her brief flirtation with grown-up politics that Yesilgöz was able to dash off to Kyiv the following week and share the limelight with Zelensky.

Unstable alliances

Yesilgöz has a track record of unstable political alliances and a talent for convincing people that the break-up was the other party’s fault. She opened the door to Wilders that Rutte had kept firmly closed since his first cabinet, with predictable and devastating results.

She stood aside as the PVV leader crushed another coalition partner, Pieter Omtzigt’s NSC, did deals with GL-PvdA to get around Wilders’ blockade on Ukraine, and turned her back Frans Timmermans as soon as Wilders brought down the cabinet.

In Yesilgöz’s world, a cabinet with a firm majority and 86 seats has no mandate from the electorate because GL-PvdA are too radical, while a coalition with no majority containing the polar opposites D66 and JA21 is a beacon of stability.

Radical right

She preaches grown-up politics but in practice supported a motion by the conspiracy kook’s party of choice, Forum for Democracy, to brand the diffuse Antifa movement a “terrorist organisation”. She has taken a mainstream liberal party and steered it towards the radical right, replacing its traditional voter base with embittered PVV supporters.

She proclaimed the party’s worst electoral result in half a century as a triumph for herself and the responsible right. There is no sign that the VVD is prepared for opposition or has given any thought to whether those PVV voters will stick with her if she is shut out of government and unable to safeguard Wilders’ immigration policies.

Yesilgöz’s electoral gamble earned her a modest payout and the voices calling for her head have been silenced for now. But if she continues to bet the VVD’s future on capturing the far-right vote, she may soon be leading the last dance at the party’s wake.

Read more by Gordon Darroch on his website Words for Press