Turnout: 78.71%
About this election
The 2021 Dutch general election, held over three days from 15 to 17 March 2021 in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, again returned Mark Rutte's VVD as the largest party and paved the way for his fourth consecutive government. The surprise of the night was the surge of Democrats 66 (D66) under Sigrid Kaag into a clear second place, the strong showing of an array of new parties, and the further splintering of the electorate, which sent a record seventeen parties into the 150-seat House of Representatives.
As in every Dutch general election, the 150 MPs were chosen by nationwide proportional representation with effectively no threshold, so the seat count tracks the vote share almost exactly and a party can enter parliament with around 0.67% of the vote. Because of the pandemic, voting was spread over three days for the first time, postal voting was opened to everyone aged 70 and over, and extra polling stations were used to reduce crowding. The fragmentation the system permits was on full display: a single seat's worth of votes was enough for small newcomers to win representation.
The election took place against the backdrop of a strict lockdown and a nationwide curfew — the first since the Second World War — which had sparked riots weeks earlier. It also followed the resignation of Rutte's third cabinet in January 2021 over the childcare-benefits scandal (toeslagenaffaire), in which tax authorities had wrongly accused thousands of families, many of immigrant background, of fraud. Despite governing through these crises, Rutte benefited from a "rally round the flag" effect, while the campaign's late momentum went to Sigrid Kaag's pro-European D66.
The VVD won 21.87% and 34 seats, its best result under Rutte. D66 jumped to 15.02% and 24 seats, overtaking the PVV to become the second party, while Wilders' PVV slipped to 10.79% and 17 seats. The CDA fell to 9.50% and 15. Beyond the big four the chamber fractured further: the SP and PvdA each took 9 seats, GroenLinks fell to 8, and Thierry Baudet's Forum for Democracy (FvD) won 8 despite a turbulent year of internal splits. A clutch of newcomers broke through — the pan-European Volt (3 seats), the right-wing JA21 (3), the Farmer–Citizen Movement (BBB, 1) and the left-wing BIJ1 (1) — alongside the Party for the Animals, the Christian Union, the SGP, DENK and 50PLUS.
Turnout was 78.71%, slightly down on 2017 but high given the pandemic. The VVD led the vote in eleven of the twelve provinces, a near-clean sweep, its support spread across both the Randstad and the rural and southern provinces; only in Groningen did another party — D66 — narrowly top the poll. The map above shows the leading party in each province; click any province for the full breakdown.
Government formation became the longest in Dutch history, lasting a record 299 days and badly damaged at the outset by a leaked official note bearing the words "position Omtzigt, function elsewhere", which triggered a confidence crisis over Rutte's honesty. The eventual outcome was a near-identical "Rutte IV" coalition of the VVD, D66, CDA and Christian Union, sworn in in January 2022. Its instability foreshadowed the collapse that would come barely eighteen months later.
Official results from the Electoral Council (Kiesraad) — verkiezingsuitslagen.nl. The provincial map is built from the Kiesraad's per-province figures.
Compiled and reviewed by Bartłomiej Paruzel, Election Data Analyst, from official results. See our data methodology.