It was typical VVD, how the party attracted media attention on Monday at the end of a newspast weekend with a message that had become politically inevitable after the fall of the cabinet. After the upcoming elections, the VVD will not re -rule again with the PVV of Geert Wilders. The PVV leader is a “runaway” and “does not take responsibility,” said VVD for woman Dilan Yesilgöz interviews with De Telegraaf and RTL.
By reasing the PVV again, the VVD part-time internal unrest hoped to nip this Saturday in the run-up to the party congress. However, that supporters are still deeply distributed about how to proceed, according to voter research and conversations with VVD people. This division is mainly about whether the VVD should now distance themselves from what critics see as the right-wing populist course that Yesilgöz used two years ago, and whether the liberals should be willing to collaborate with GroenLinks-PvdA.
VVD councilor Haitske van de Linde from Hilversum really finds it time for a different course. She is active with the new VVD members, one of the networks in the party that advocates a return to a fully -fledged liberal course. Van de Linde has been annoyed for years what she calls “fast food politics”: the VVD is all about strategy and imaging, and too little about the content.
Van de Linde sees this in the way party leader Yesilgöz now excludes the PVV and Wilders. “I especially hear that the PVV is unreliable. But I do not hear any substantive objections, nothing about the universal human rights that we as VVD stand for.” And it is precisely on that point that the VVD should be much clearer in the lindenness in times of geopolitical uncertainty. “We need a fundamental definition. Let’s say that we will never again collaborate with parties that undermine our rule of law and democracy.”
No regrets
Such a substantive twist is difficult for Yesilgöz, because she never had those fundamental objections to cooperation with Wilders. As brand new party leader, she raised the blockade of the PVV in the summer of 2023, after which she opted for a right cabinet in the formation to make a stricter asylum policy possible. She still doesn’t regret that choice, wrote Yesilgöz this week on the VVD site. There would have been no “fundamental difference of opinion” with the PVV, although the ten-point plan that Wilders submitted went much further than the VVD election program and numerous non-right-wing and impracticable proposals contained, such as closing the boundaries for all asylum seekers.
Opinion researcher Peter Kanne from Ipsos I&O does not understand that Yesilgöz does not distance himself from these PVV proposals. “It is now that she can show that the VVD still cares about the rule of law. If you keep going in PVV rhetoric, you walk again in the populist knife.” Kanne points out the danger that re -making the theme of migration can give Wilders to the campaign, as happened in 2023. Yesilgöz is therefore better able to concentrate on other spearheads of the VVD, Kanne thinks. “Think of Defense and the threat of Russia, and a possible economic crisis. On those themes, the VVD is traditionally trusted as a stable director’s party.”
Voter research from Ipsos I&O Show a mixed image when it comes to the priorities of VVD voters. The economy is the main reason for VVD people to choose that party, was the most recent poll from IPSOS I&O. But immigration scores the highest if VVD voters are asked what is the most important issue for politics to tackle.
‘Great disappointment’
Before the right flank of the VVD, that is a reason not to let go of the theme in the competition with the PVV, says the Twente VVD member Reinier Geerligs, chairman of the Classical Liberal network. Geerligs was in favor of the collaboration with the PVV and calls it “a big disappointment” that Wilders dropped the cabinet.
Yesilgöz should not adjust her right -wing course now, says Geerligs. “She has given the VVD color again.” Classic liberal believes that the VVD in the outgoing cabinet should hurry with the treatment of the asylum laws that PVV minister Marjolein Faber leaves before the elections. “You just have to go out of your own strength on asylum. If we are going to deliver with those laws now, I am convinced that we can retrieve voters from the PVV.”
The discussion about the course is related to the question of which parties the VVD will soon be able to collaborate in a cabinet. Geerligs thinks the exclusion of the PVV ‘unwise’ and classic liberal does not want a collaboration with GroenLinks-PvdA. According to Geerligs, the differences between VVD and the left combination are “incredibly large” when it comes to topics such as migration, economy, defense, safety and support for Israel. “Timmermans says that he does not want to move a millimeter to the right. I see with disadvantaged eyes how the PvdA is taken over by the radicals of GroenLinks.”
Hard personal attack
The sentiment that expresses Geerligs lives wider under the VVD supporters. Despite the cabinet trap, more VVD members still want to collaborate with the PVV (18 percent) than with GroenLinks-PvdA (9 percent), according to the IPSOS I&O research. 56 percent explicitly do not want to rule with the left. It shows how difficult the strategic split is in which Yesilgöz is located after excluding the PVV. She also spoke this week about “left -wing radicalism” and wrote that the merger with GroenLinks “has taken the PvdA from the middle of Dutch politics.” And in the parliamentary debate about the fall of the cabinet, Yesilgöz Timmermans personally attacked.
Irresponsible, thinks opinion investigator Kanne. “Keep it to tell Timmermans Nederland to the Bellen.” It is precisely political leaders such as Yesilgöz to break the political polarization at the start of a new campaign, says Kanne. “The VVD always stood for a country in which we make coalitions and compromises. That is how the Netherlands works, and I am convinced that voters will eventually reward that.”