Netherlands Municipal elections 2018 — Results

Background

The 2018 Dutch municipal elections, held on 21 March 2018 across most of the country's municipalities, chose the local councils (gemeenteraden) that govern at the lowest tier of Dutch administration. As in every recent local election, the dominant story was the strength of independent local parties, which together won far more votes than any national party — a long-running feature of Dutch local democracy. The vote was held on the same day as the national referendum on the Intelligence and Security Services Act.

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.

The outcome

Local parties won 28.65% of the national vote and around 2,600 council seats — comfortably the largest bloc. Among the national parties, the VVD (13.50%) and CDA (13.41%) led, followed by D66 (9.18%) and GroenLinks (8.87%), which made strong gains in the big cities, most symbolically in Amsterdam, where it became the largest party. The Labour Party (7.52%) continued to struggle. The result reinforced the picture of fragmentation and localism that characterises the Dutch municipal level.

Turnout and regional patterns

Turnout was 54.97%, boosted somewhat by the concurrent referendum. Local parties topped the vote in every province, but their dominance was greatest in the south and the periphery — Limburg and North Brabant, where local and regional lists are deeply entrenched — and weakest in the urbanised province of Utrecht, where the national parties hold up better. The map above shows the leading party (or the aggregate of local parties) in each province; click any province for the full breakdown.

What followed

The 2018 results fed into months of local coalition-building across hundreds of municipalities. The continued rise of local parties, and the contrast between the green-left strength in the cities and the dominance of local lists in the regions, previewed the urban-rural divide that would define national politics over the following years. GroenLinks's urban breakthrough, in particular, presaged its prominence in the 2019 European and provincial campaigns.

Source

Official results from the Electoral Council (Kiesraad) — verkiezingsuitslagen.nl. The provincial map aggregates the Kiesraad's municipal results to province level.

Compiled and reviewed from official results by ElectioMap. See our data methodology.