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If we position the 2017 elections in the Netherlands in its broader historical context, it underlines the overarching trend of the demise of the big parties. This is a trend that of course has its parallels elsewhere; the absence of the classical big parties in the latest presidential run-off in France is a major example. Still, the trend in Dutch politics is particularly pronounced and steady. If we look at the three big parties that have been central to Dutch politics – CDA, PvdA and VVD – we see that they would take well over 80% or even over 90% of the parliamentary seats in the 1950s. Since then, their share has gone down, even if one or the other of them would sometimes bounce back at the cost of the others. Actually, until the mid-1970s there were three mainstream Christian-Democratic parties, with the Catholic KVP the most prominent one. As they saw their vote share decline, they merged into the CDA.

The party landscape that emerged from the mid-1970s onwards basically had the newly merged CDA in a pivotal positon in the middle. Depending on the election outcome, it would either form a coalition on its left-hand side with the Labour Party or on its right-hand side with the liberal-conservative VVD.

[42] Figure 1: Evolution of the seat share of the three main parties in the Dutch parliament

This straightforward left-right logic was however brutally disturbed when in 1994 the CDA had a disastrous election result dropping from 54 seats to 34. For the first time since 1917 no Christian parties were involved in the government coalition. Instead, Prime Minister Wim Kok formed a so-called “purple” coalition that joined his Labour Party with the liberal conservative VVD and the progressive liberals of D66.

While the purple coalition thus broke the hegemony of the Christian-Democrats, it also indicated that the ideological differences between the main Dutch parties had become very small, leaving little to choose for the average voter.

It is on this sense of a lack of electoral choice and a sense of closed-up elite politics that Pim Fortuijn successfully mobilized in the 2002 election campaign. As is well-known, Pim Fortuijn was shot by an animal activist in the week before the 2002 elections. But it is on the same kind of sentiments that Geert Wilders has been campaigning ever since he left the VVD-party in 2004: a disgust of the establishment and resentment against migrants (especially Muslim migrants) and against internationalism (especially European integration).

While the governing parties thus demonstrated that all combinations were possible and thus that all party differences were surmountable, voters – like in [43] most Western countries – became ever less loyal to them. In the Netherlands, such loss of loyalty becomes easily visible as there is no threshold for new parties to enter the parliament and there is hence a considerable number of parties competing for the vote. Figure 2 demonstrates how voter volatility has shot up ever since the mid-1990s, with the 2017 elections coming second with 38 of the 150 seats transferred after 2002 (the Fortuijn election) when this was 46.

Figure 2: Seat transfers between parties per elections

Presumably the increase of voter volatility also reflects a trend of ideological preferences becoming more diverse and less coherent (cf. Blumenstiel 2014). Voters vary on ever more dimensions. Ideological preferences in terms of left and right have become detached from preferences on ethical issues, on international cooperation, on the environment and on migration. In other words, we find a greater number of ideological combinations and, hence, voters inevitably have to compromise on some issues once they cast their vote for one party rather than another.