This week saw several major Dutch political parties neck-and-neck ahead of today’s vote. Now, the exit polls have been announced. 👇
The results? D66 has surged ahead as Rob Jetten surprises the Netherlands.
According to the 9:30 PM poll, D66, led by Rob Jetten, is projected to take the lead with 27 seats, putting them narrowly ahead of Geert Wilders’ PVV, which follows with 25 seats.
But the real surprise of the night? The VVD. After weeks of dire polling that had them stuck below 15 seats, they’ve made a dramatic comeback, securing 23 seats in the exit poll.
It’s a disappointing evening for GroenLinks–PvdA, who drop five seats to 20, while Henry Bontebal’s CDA appears to be holding steady with 19 seats. But this is also somewhat disappointing after being touted as the next prime minister many times in this election campaign.
One thing seems certain though: Rob Jetten’s D66 has pulled off an election night surprise, and the coming coalition talks are set to be as complicated as ever.
What are these results based on?
The current results are based on research carried out by Ipsos I&O, commissioned by the NOS and RTL.
Researchers base their results on the voting behaviour and turnout at 65 polling stations across the Netherlands, with these stations chosen to provide the best representation of voting behaviour throughout the country.
Based on previous elections, this exit poll is usually accurate in determining the seat distributions in the House of Representatives. However, they do use a margin of error of one or two seats per party.
What does this mean? The exit poll may indicate that one party has earned 25 seats, while another has earned 27. However, once the final count is given, it could be that both parties earned 26 seats.
In other words, while this exit poll is usually pretty accurate, there’s still a chance that there may be a small difference between these results and the final results of the election. We’ll know more about the exact results by tomorrow, but they won’t shift that much.
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For use non-Dutch people reading this article it would be nice for the list of results to have an extra column with a descriptive word says where on the political spectrum the party is (left, right, centre, extremist racist, tree hugger, etc), only a Dutch person would know all those acronyms.