In The Spectator, Arnout Nuijt explains that what appears to be a win for center-left party D66 in the Netherlands, the lesson that should be taken from the country’s recent election is that the electorate is moving rightward toward Geert Wilders’s ideas, and away from those of former EU Commissioner Frans Timmermans. Nuijt explains:

Yet, the underlying message of this election is unmistakable: the Dutch electorate continues to nudge the party system rightwards. D66 has shifted to the right, clearly allowing it to win big; Timmermans’s radical experiment on the left has been routed. Other left-wing parties fared no better. The small and once-Maoist Socialist party even lost 60 percent of its support – its tenth consecutive national defeat.

The right, meanwhile, remains potent, merely redistributed. Wilders, ever the tribune of the disaffected, will carry on in opposition – a role made for him – railing against Islamization, immigration and rising living costs. Many of those abandoned by the left will still find refuge in his rhetoric.

An Ipsos poll found that 40 percent of Dutch voters favor a right-wing coalition, with smaller minorities leaning left or center. Jetten faces a formidable task assembling a stable majority. A coalition with the VVD and Christian Democrats would form a centrist bloc, but still fall short. The VVD will block any role for GreenLeft-Labour, leaving Jetten to look instead towards JA21, a more polished, immigration-skeptical party on the right that did very well yesterday. Such an alliance would be fragile – yet broad enough to show that D66 intends to take the country’s asylum crisis seriously, and acknowledge that “anywheres” are not the only people in the country.

Read more here.