Dutch centrist party D66 has won the most votes in Wednesday’s general election, news agency ANP said, putting its 38-year-old leader Rob Jetten on course to become the youngest-ever prime minister in the Netherlands.<\/p>\n
With almost all votes counted, D66 can no longer be overtaken by the far-right Freedom Party (PVV) led by Geert Wilders, according to the news agency, which collects the results from all municipalities in the Netherlands.<\/p>\n
D66 is now expected to take the lead in a first round of talks to form a coalition government, a process which usually takes months.<\/p>\n
With around 18% of the votes, the party will need at least three coalition partners to reach a simple majority in the 150-seat Lower House of Parliament.<\/p>\n
The pro-EU, liberal D66 tripled its seat count with an upbeat campaign and a surge in advertising spending, while Mr Wilders lost a large part of the support that had propelled him to a shock victory at the previous poll in 2023.<\/p>\n
Still, the election turned into a nailbiter, as preliminary results indicated a narrow victory for D66, while the PVV briefly pulled ahead towards the end of the count.<\/p>\n
Although all mainstream parties had already ruled out working with him, Mr Wilders had said he would demand to have a first crack at forming a coalition if his party was confirmed to have the most votes.<\/p>\n
Confirmation of the result will come on Monday, when mail ballots cast by Dutch residents living abroad are counted.<\/p>\n
Party leaders will discuss the next steps on Tuesday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dutch centrist party D66 has won the most votes in Wednesday’s general election, news agency ANP said, putting…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":114209,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-114208","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114208"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114208\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/114209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}