Netherlands Municipal elections 2018 — Results
Election day: March 21, 2018
- Local parties: 28.65%
- People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD): 13.50%
- Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA): 13.41%
- Democrats 66 (D66): 9.18%
- GreenLeft (GL): 8.87%
- Labour Party (PvdA): 7.52%
- Socialist Party (SP): 4.44%
- Christian Union (CU): 3.83%
Turnout: 54.97%
About this election
How the voting works
Each municipality elects its council by proportional representation, with the number of seats fixed by population. Candidates may stand for national parties' local branches or for purely local lists (lokale partijen) that contest only one municipality. The councils choose the aldermen (wethouders) who, with the centrally appointed mayor, form the municipal executive. Because local lists do not aggregate into a single national party, their combined vote is reported here as one "Local parties" figure, even though it represents hundreds of separate organisations.
Compiled and reviewed from official results by ElectioMap. See our data methodology.
In numbers
- 15.15 points separated Local parties from People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD).
- The top two shared 42.15% of the vote between them, and 6 lists cleared 5%.
- Support for Local parties ranged from 41.34% in Limburg to 18.86% in Utrecht — a spread of 22.48 points across 12 regions, and it led in 12 of 12.
- Turnout of 54.97% is the highest of the 2 municipal electionss covered here since 2018.
Calculated from the official figures on this page and from the other elections of this type in our archive.
Understanding this election
- D’Hondt vs Sainte-Laguë — how a divisor formula turns vote shares into seats
- How Electoral Systems Work Around the World — first-past-the-post, proportional and mixed systems, with real numbers
- Why Election Maps Look Different From the Popular Vote — why a map can look one-sided when the vote was close