Netherlands Municipal elections 2022 — Results

Background

The 2022 Dutch municipal elections, held on 16 March 2022, again confirmed the dominance of independent local parties at the grassroots of Dutch democracy and were notable for a record-low turnout. Held just weeks after Mark Rutte's fourth cabinet had finally taken office following the longest government formation in Dutch history, the elections doubled as an early gauge of the national mood.

How the voting works

As in 2018, each municipality elected its council by proportional representation, with seats scaled to population and a mix of national-party branches and purely local lists competing. The councils then choose the municipal executive of aldermen. The combined vote of the many hundreds of independent local lists is reported here as a single "Local parties" total, reflecting their collective weight rather than any unified organisation.

The outcome

Local parties won 31.28% of the vote — a new high — and around 3,000 council seats, extending their long-term advance. Among the national parties the VVD (11.70%) and CDA (11.21%) again led, followed by D66 (8.81%), GroenLinks (8.49%) and the Labour Party (7.85%). In several cities GroenLinks and Labour, increasingly cooperating, performed strongly, while the established Christian-democratic and liberal parties continued their slow erosion. The newer national parties made only limited inroads at the local level, where personal reputation and local issues dominate.

Turnout and regional patterns

Turnout fell to 50.99%, among the lowest ever recorded for Dutch municipal elections, reflecting voter fatigue after the drawn-out national coalition talks and the lingering effects of the pandemic. Local parties topped the vote in every province, overwhelmingly so in Limburg (over 46%) and North Brabant, and least so in the more nationally aligned provinces of the Randstad. 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 low turnout and the continued surge of local parties were widely read as signs of disengagement from national party politics and growing distance between citizens and "The Hague" — sentiments that would erupt a year later in the BBB provincial landslide and the radical-right victory in the 2023 general election. Local coalition negotiations across the country produced a patchwork of executives in the months that followed.

Why local parties dominate Dutch town halls

The single most distinctive feature of Dutch municipal elections — that a loose collection of purely local lists outpolls every national party — has structural roots. At the local level there is effectively no national threshold to clear and no national party discipline to answer to, so lists built around a neighbourhood grievance, a well-known local figure or a single issue can win seats on their own terms. Voters, in turn, treat the municipal ballot as a judgement on potholes, housing and local services rather than on the parties of The Hague, and reward candidates they actually know. That is why the "Local parties" total reported here is an aggregate of hundreds of separate organisations rather than one movement, and why its share has climbed election after election to the 2022 record of 31.28%. The pattern connects directly to the wider revolt against establishment politics: our 2018 municipal page shows the earlier stage of that climb, and the 2023 provincial election, where the brand-new BBB swept all twelve provinces, shows where the same anti-Hague current led once it found a national vehicle.

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.