Opinion polls predict that anti-Muslim lawmaker Geert Wilders and his Liberal Party will win the most seats.
Published October 29, 2025
Dutch citizens are voting in a high-stakes snap election dominated by immigration and housing issues that will test the power of the rising far-right across Europe.
Voting began at 7:30 a.m. (6:30 p.m. Japan time) on Wednesday, with opinion polls suggesting anti-Islam lawmaker Geert Wilders and his far-right Freedom Party (PVV) are on track to win the most seats in the 150-member lower house. However, the three moderate parties are closing the gap, and half of voters are undecided.
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After the results are known, parties will have to negotiate the composition of the next coalition government using a proportional representation system, which means no party will be able to reach the 76 seats needed for a single government.
A key question is whether other political parties will cooperate with Mr. Wilders, known as the “Dutch Trump” in reference to the US president. Wilders triggered the election by pulling the PVV out of a fractious four-nation coalition and bringing down the previous government over immigration.
All mainstream political parties found his views so distasteful that they considered him an unreliable coalition partner and once again ruled out working with him. It seems likely that the party leader who ranks second in the polls will become prime minister.
Reporting from The Hague, Al Jazeera’s Step Wassen said the campaign was “dominated by calls for immigration restrictions” with “some violent protests against refugee centres”.
In a pre-election interview with AFP, Wilders said people were “tired of mass immigration and cultural change and the influx of people who culturally don’t really belong here.”
“The future of our country is at stake,” he said.
Rob Jetten, leader of D66, a center-left party that calls for not only curbing immigration but also action for asylum seekers, told Wilders that voters could “choose again tomorrow and listen to another 20 years of your petulant hate, or just get to work with positive energy and tackle this problem and solve it.”
“We look forward to the day when we can put an end to the Wilders era, and that day is tomorrow,” Frans Timmermans, a former European Commission vice-president who now heads the center-left Labor Party and the Green Left, said in the final debate before the election.
In addition to immigration, the housing crisis, which particularly affects young people in this densely populated country, is also a key issue in the election campaign.
The Election Commission has registered 27 political parties and 1,166 candidates running for the House of Representatives elections.
This means it will be a large ballot, as it will have the names of all the political parties and the candidates on each party’s list.
Voting ends at 9pm (20:00 GMT).
