The Dutch General election of 2021 took place across three days between March 15 and March 17, with voters in the Netherlands electing 150 members of their lower house, the House of Representatives. According to
, the current Prime Minister, Mark Rutte and his center-right People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) are on course to be re-elected for a fourth-term in office. Rutte will likely not have enough seats for a majority, but will still win the most seats and therefore form a coalition with the other parties. In the
that took place in 2017 for example, Rutte and the VVD won 33 seats, and formed a coalition with three other parties, the Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA) , Democrats 66 (D66), and Christian Union (CU). Although the right-wing populist Party for Freedom (PVV) and its leader Geert Wilders may win the second-highest number of seats, it is unlikely that Rutte will seek a coalition with Wilders due to his party's controversial positions on immigration and Islam.
Voting in the shadow of COVID-19
The
Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, and the government's handling of it obviously looms large in the minds of many voters. Compared with other European countries, the Netherlands has quite a high
case rate but has a relatively low
death rate in contrast to neighboring Belgium. The Netherlands was also one of the last European countries to start vaccinating its population, and has one of the lowest
vaccination rates in the continent as a consequence. As is the case in several European countries, lockdown measures are still in place in the Netherlands, along with a night-time curfew that means people must stay inside between 21:30 and 04:00hrs. These
curfew measures, first introduced in January 2021, led to some of the worst riots in the Netherlands for a generation, with protests continuing in the lead up to the election.
Rutte expected to win despite tough term
Although the election was scheduled to take place in March 2021 anyway, Mark Rutte is currently only a caretaker Prime Minister, after his entire government resigned in January 2021 due to a scandal involving
child benefits. Between 2012 and 2019, the Dutch tax authorities accused more than 20,000 families of fraudulently claiming child benefits that they were actually entitled to. The fact that many of those accusations appear to have been based on ethnic backgrounds only added to the severity of the scandal. Another issue that plagued Rutte's third term was that of farmer protests, which saw Dutch famers frequently block roads with tractors following the government introducing restrictions on nitrogen emissions. While the
Dutch agricultural sector is a particularly large and important part of the economy, the growing environmentalist sentiment of Dutch politics has often put farmers and politicians against each other. The issue is unlikely to improve soon, with the environment seen by 35 percent of Dutch people as being one of the
most important issues facing the country.
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