Netherlands General election 2017 — Results
Election day: March 15, 2017
- People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD): 21.29%, 33 seats
- Party for Freedom (PVV): 13.06%, 20 seats
- Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA): 12.38%, 19 seats
- Democrats 66 (D66): 12.23%, 19 seats
- GreenLeft (GL): 9.13%, 14 seats
- Socialist Party (SP): 9.09%, 14 seats
- Labour Party (PvdA): 5.70%, 9 seats
- Christian Union (CU): 3.39%, 5 seats
Turnout: 81.57%
About this election
How the voting works
The Netherlands elects its 150 MPs by one of the purest systems of proportional representation in the world. The entire country is a single national constituency, and seats are allocated by the largest-average (D'Hondt) method with no formal electoral threshold beyond the natural one — a party needs roughly 0.67% of the vote (one seat's worth, the kiesdeler) to enter parliament. This produces a famously fragmented chamber in which thirteen or more parties win seats and no party comes close to a majority, so every government is a negotiated coalition. The MPs serve four-year terms, and the prime minister is the leader of the largest party able to assemble a majority.
Compiled and reviewed from official results by ElectioMap. See our data methodology.
In numbers
- 8.23 points separated People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) from Party for Freedom (PVV) — 865,410 votes.
- People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) converted 21.29% of the vote into 33 of 150 seats (22.00%), 0.71 points more than its vote share.
- The top two shared 34.35% of the vote between them, and 7 lists cleared 5%.
- Support for People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) ranged from 24.09% in Noord-Brabant to 13.88% in Groningen — a spread of 10.21 points across 12 regions, and it led in 8 of 12.
- Turnout of 81.57% is the highest of the 3 general elections covered here since 2017.
Calculated from the official figures on this page and from the other elections of this type in our archive.
Understanding this election
- Why Election Maps Look Different From the Popular Vote — why a map can look one-sided when the vote was close
- How a Constituency Map Gets Built — what happens when no boundary file matches the districts
- How We Check an Election Figure — the checks every number passes before publication