After the cabinet trap, VVD leader Dilan Yesilgöz excludes Geert Wilders PVV in the next formation after the national elections in October. Yesilgöz announced this on Monday evening in an interview in De Telegraaf. According to Yesilgöz, Wilders “run away for the second time, it was irresponsible and totally unreliable.”
What the new course of the VVD would be against Wilders was since the cabinet the question last week. Until now, Yesilgöz did not want to say whether or not she would refuse to rule with the PVV again. According to Yesilgöz, this was a tough and complicated decision that she could not make in a short time – despite persistent questions from other groups in the Lower House and from journalists.
Without Yesilgöz’s decision, the VVD-PVV ratio also seemed to be an important theme on the VVD congress next Saturday. By clearly excluding the PVV, Yesilgöz prevents it from being put under pressure on the congress.
Behind the scenes in The Hague, it was already expected that the VVD would no longer accept the PVV after the fall of the Schoof cabinet. Yesilgöz and a series of other VVD people have often and emphatically told the press that they find Wilders ‘unreliable’. Yesilgöz says in De Telegraaf having consulted a lot with VVD people in recent times: “None of them said that Wilders deserved another chance.”
VVD members draw the comparison with 2012, when the PVV left the coalition with the VVD and the CDA as a tolerance partner. After that, the VVD leader Mark Rutte Wilders then consistently excluded, and put away as unreliable. According to political analysts, that kept the PVV smaller in the elections thereafter. Until Yesilgöz opened the door again in 2023 for collaboration with Wilders, and the PVV was more than the largest.
Yesilgöz says he has consulted a lot with VVD people in recent times: “None of them said that Wilders deserved a chance”
Ten asylum measures
According to the VVD-and also according to the other former coalitionmates NSC and BBB-Wilders dropped the cabinet without needing it. Wilders had called the coalitionmates last Monday and presented ten asylum measures to them. He demanded that his partners would sign the list. The coalitionmates refused – they thought Wilders’ own minister of asylum Marjolein Faber had to get started with the plans.
The next day Wilders dropped the cabinet, according to Yesilgöz without being able to consult with him at all about a way to resolve the created conflict. Wilders said the VVD leader, the cabinet did not drop over asylum, but because he wanted to get out. Yesilgöz continued to repeat that, also in the interview in De Telegraaf.
Now that the VVD excludes the PVV, the possibilities for a cabinet over the right seem to have become more difficult, given the current polls. Depending on the result, it is possible that, for example, GroenLinks-PvdA and the VVD, as larger parties will enter the next formation together.
Wilders already uses that prospect in a message on X: “She wants to destroy the Netherlands together with the left,” he writes about the decision of Yesilgöz to put the PVV aside.
That is a complicated prospect, because Yesilgöz and GL-PvdA leader Frans Timmermans are publicly constantly in conflict with each other. Timmermans holds Yesilgöz responsible for bringing the radical right to power, and therefore also for the moderate performance of the Cabinet Schoof. Yesilgöz, in turn, is hard about the substantive plans of Timmermans, who would be difficult to unite with the wishes of the VVD.
Political-strategic search Yesilgöz and Timmermans are somewhat on each other, but in terms of content they are still far apart
Collaboration with links
But since Saturday, Yesilgöz has created more air for a possible collaboration with the left. In the Financieele Dagblad She said that GroenLinks-PvdA is “a normal party”, which takes responsibility “in their own way.”
Earlier on Monday, Timmermans in Eindhoven spoke on the campaign kick of GroenLinks-PvdA. There he said: “We want to be a large left -wing popular movement, then we will have to extend our hands to the parties in the middle.” In other words: Timmermans does like a collaboration with the VVD. But in terms of content he does not want to move to the right. “The Fermer we are on our left -wing positions, the greater the chance that parties that have moved to the right will return to the middle.”
So political-strategic search Yesilgöz and Timmermans are somewhat on each other, but in terms of content they are still far apart. Yesilgöz said in De Telegraaf: “The substantive differences with PvdA/GL are huge, but I fight them on content.” And those substantive differences – including about Gaza, she mentions herself, are no reason to exclude a party.
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Campaign-kick GL-PvdA: Timmermans balances between the left and the middle