You know, the Dutch, they are so liberal, they’ve got two liberal parties… And one of them, the one that’s most like us, D66, were the smaller party in a coalition, and then in 2006 they got stuffed. 2%, 3 MPs, they came ninth.… But you know what, just scroll forward to last year at the European elections. Ninth? No. First. First. … There’s a model we can copy. Survival and revival is in our grasp. Have hope. Have belief.
– Speech by Tim Farron, our former leader, on 2015.
Fast forward to 29th October 2025, D66 became the largest party in the Dutch parliament for the first time, with the vote share of 16.9%. No political pundit predicted this happening when the election was called. According to most opinion polls, they were only on 5-6%. D66 was not even invited to the TV debate between the major parties.
Meanwhile, VVD suffered from a setback at the early stage of the election campaign after a mishap of their party leader Dilan Yeşilgöz MP. However they recovered very quickly and retained 22 seats (A loss of only 2), which is quite an achievement considering they had been in the last government with the populist PVV.
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