At 38, Rob Jetten, with his confident smile and “We can do it” slogan, is on course to become the Netherlands’s youngest prime minister.His liberal-progressive D66 party almost tripled its number of seats in parliament in the October 29 general election.Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of listDutch far-right firebrand Geert Wilders suffered significant losses in the vote, as his anti-immigration, anti-Islam Party for Freedom (PVV) shed 11 seats, returning to the opposition after a hobbling first stint in a coalition government.While this result was cast as a victory for the centre over the far right, and a good omen for Europe’s liberal front, experts sound a note of caution.“There was a return to the centre in the sense that a number of centre parties gained in these elections,” Leiden University professor Bernard Steunenberg told Al Jazeera.Jetten’s D66 bagged 26 seats, a gain of 17 seats since the last election. The Christian Democrats (CDA), another party near the centre, won 18 seats, nine more than in 2023.But “we still have a rather substantial right-wing volume of voters”, Steunenberg added.Wilders’s PVV and Jetten’s D66 both won 26 seats in the Dutch parliament, becoming the biggest parties by seat numbers. The former won over the latter by a slim margin of 28,400 votes, out of more than 10 million cast.PVV won about 17 percent of the vote, down from about a quarter in 2023, its second-highest election score.Experts say that far-right ideas and policies have not been sidelined in the Netherla …
