Parties come and go, but the VVD is never lost. With no political party in the Netherlands, self -confidence is usually that high. But it has been different lately. VVD people see that it is not going. More than two months before the parliamentary elections of 29 October, there is a discussion about party leader Dilan Yesilgöz. There are historically poor polls. It can also go wrong once.
In the party they try to keep the courage, Henri Kruithof, a well-introduced former spokesperson for the VVD group. But it is not the well-known VVD airiness, he says, it is “cramped optimism.” “It can’t be otherwise. You can’t take the street if you don’t believe in it at all. It is very human to block negative sentiments. That is why I do not think that Yesilgöz will be replaced by someone else, the party would go down completely.”
The VVD has been stacking “Blunder on Blunder for two years,” says Kruithof, and in the whisper circuit that analysis is often agreed. The VVD dropped the fourth Rutte cabinet on migration, opened the door for collaboration with the PVV, and drags itself with Yesilgöz as leader from riot to riot.
This week’s riot: a controversial performance by Yesilgöz in the program ANGRY from Tim Hofman. It should have been about online threats, but degenerated into a long -term fight about her behavior on Social Medium X, in which she accused, taken back words and again entered into discussion. The leader who no longer knows about a party who no longer knows.
Immune for collapse
Yet some of the VVD decades have believed that they were the only twentieth-century people’s party immune to what had previously happened to the CDA and the PvdA. In most of the last century, three movements determined Dutch politics: the confessionals (KVP, CHU, ARP and later the CDA merger), the Social Democrats (PvdA) and the Liberals (VVD and D66).
CDA, PvdA and VVD were the three indestructible people’s parties at the time, with wide supporters and ideas that rooted in a century earlier, the nineteenth. And with an almost self -evident subscription to power.
In this century two mass extinctions of traditional people’s parties took place. The CDA collapsed in recent decades and now has five room seats, although there is hope that that trend will be turned with Henri Bontenbal. The PvdA dropped back to nine room seats in 2017, and is now making a restart with GroenLinks.
Stable Rutte years
That does not happen to us, VVD people often said in recent years. In 2010 the party had become the largest in the Netherlands, and the Rutte era (2010-2023) was one of enormous stability. That was not only because Rutte was popular. Liberalism is the most future -proof of the three old ideologies. At least, VVD members saw that.
And there is something in it, says Gerrit Voerman, emeritus professor of parliamentary history. “Society has been strongly individualized after descending. Thinking in groups and collectives of the other two ideologies has fallen seriously in decline in recent decades. I have always said to my students: the VVD is gazing a golden future.”
But every party can collapse, Voerman knows, also the VVD. Two causes are needed for this: there must be something wrong for a long time. At the CDA, for example, the secularization played a role. And there must be an acute crisis that makes things collapse. Consider the collaboration of the CDA with the PVV that led in 2010 to great division and a leadership crisis that lasted for many years.
Leadership of Yesilgöz
The VVD now knows this problem, says Gerrit Voerman. There is something current, the poor leadership of Dilan Yesilgöz and the powerlessness of the VVD to separate themselves from the Rutte years. At the same time there is a structural problem. “On the right side of the VVD, a permanent radical-right flow has emerged. It not only removes voters from the VVD, but also makes the party uncertain about its own story. One strategy was exchanged by the other, from exclusion and distance to the imitation of radical right. They do not know how to relate to their own position.”
During the 2023 campaign, Dilan Yesilgöz opened the door to the PVV in an incomprehensible way, after years of cooperation was excluded. With that decision, the structural and current weaknesses of the VVD came together in a poisonous way, says Gerrit Voerman. “And it remains inexplicable how even the most professional party in the Netherlands, with the most money and best voter’s research, was able to reclaim.” In the meantime, the VVD is back at the old position: Yesilgöz announced in June that she no longer wants to rule with the PVV.
For years, rule without the VVD was practically impossible. Since 2010 there were no center left or right combinations possible without the liberals. But VVD people feel that their natural dominant position has become shaky. The Pollthe weighted average of Ipsos I&O and Verian/EenVandaagthe party now gives between 20 and 24 seats (the VVD now has 24 seats). But the trend is downwards, and a few summer polls suggest a chance of a dramatic loss.
Henri Kruithof zegt: „Ik reken op tien tot vijftien zetels. Het is nu te laat om de strategie nog om te gooien of met een nieuwe lijsttrekker te komen. En een groot verlies hoeft ook niet slecht te zijn. Het kan goed zijn voor een partij om eens door een diep dal te gaan. Alleen dan komt het denken over een nieuw verhaal en een nieuwe strategie op gang. Dat kost vier, misschien acht jaar, met een nieuwe leider. Ik heb het verhaal nooit geloofd dat het de VVD niet kan come across. ”