The party picked the line to underscore its optimistic campaign promises on housing and education, but the mantra applied also to its result: With a preliminary forecast predicting 26 seats, D66 is on track to achieve its best result ever and become the Netherlands’ largest party after a stunning late surge.
To illustrate its reversal of fortunes: In the 2023 election, D66 won just nine seats, 17 fewer than on Wednesday.
Addressing journalists on election night, Jetten said the results were nothing short of historic, “because we’ve shown not only to the Netherlands but also to the world that it’s possible to beat populist and extreme-right movements.”
Fiscally conservative liberals
At the start of election night, a visitor attending the election watch party of the center-right liberals of the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) joked that they’d gone ahead and “sent out the funeral bouquets.”
The party had been shedding support in the polls, with the gloomiest projections predicting that it could lose 10 seats compared with its 2023 results, which were already down from 2021.
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