The politicians who go into the country in the coming months will mostly affect voters who think it is going in the wrong direction with the Netherlands, who distrust the government and who are increasingly delivered about what happens in the rest of the world. This is apparent from the citizen perspectives published on Thursday of the Social and Cultural Planning Bureau (SCP), a Research that is conducted three times a year.
The mood in the Netherlands is therefore almost the same as when the Rutte IV cabinet fell in the summer of 2023: negative, gloomy and pessimistic. But according to the SCP there are also differences with then. Dissatisfaction with politics lives more wider, for example because also trust in the government has fallen among academically trained voters. More people are worried about conflicts elsewhere in the world, which means they want more investments in defense (but not at the expense of, for example, education and care). And more people think that politicians are mainly concerned with each other and therefore do not sufficiently come to solve large social tasks.
Majority: things are not going well
It leads, during group discussions with citizens, it leads to “increasingly to sigh that we will no longer get it done in the Netherlands”. ‘Feelings of powerlessness and frustration’ also grow. People, says SCP researcher Josje den Ridder, “have the feeling that little has been resolved or improved in the two years that we are.”
The investigation was conducted in the months before the cabinet fell. Almost six in ten Dutch people thought it was going in the wrong direction, 44 percent of the respondents gave the government a sufficient. About the same number of people gave the entire politics in The Hague sufficient. For both government and entire politics, these are fewer people than in the autumn of 2024, when the SCP did the same investigation and the Cabinet Schoof had just taken office. Then 51 percent gave a sufficient.
Also among PVV voters the support for the cabinet was low: only a third gave it a sufficient one. That came, the researchers write, especially because they found that the cabinet was not received enough to limit the asylum inflow. For Geert Wilders, those figures will be a support: at the beginning of this month he pulled the plug from the cabinet for the same reason. The electoral risks of that step, especially when the PVV supplied the Minister of Asylum, seem limited.
There is not one theme that dominates the concerns of Dutch people, the research shows: there are great concerns about many major topics. Yes, asylum and migration live wide and a majority wants fewer migrants to come to the Netherlands. Many people also mention the way of living together as worries, for example due to a lack of social cohesion and an increase in enhancing. But there are also concerns about incomes, poverty and economic differences – even a little more than about immigration. And the same number of people call the housing market as an important social problem.