What happens when you put far-right populists in charge? Entrusted with ministerial responsibilities, can they deliver the radical solutions that they often preach? Or do they, sooner or later, when faced with complex policy dilemmas, end up self-destructing, leaving an even bigger mess in their wake?

That is the question Dutch voters had to weigh on Wednesday after a tumultuous two-year experiment in which Geert Wilders’ far-right Freedom Party (PVV) joined a rightwing coalition to run the Netherlands for the first time.

At a time when populist parties are vying for power in much of Europe, including France, Germany and the UK, but may have reached their limits in Hungary, the Dutch general election could be a signpost for Europe more broadly.

It will probably take months of negotiations before the exact shape of the next governing coalition becomes clear. (Jon Henley’s great explainer takes you through the 27-party menu of scenarios.) Opinion polls indicated a tight race. But most parties, keen to warn that a vote for the PVV was a wasted ballot, vowed to exclude Wilders from government – whatever his score.

That doesn’t mean the PVV’s “the Netherlands is full” narratives are out of favour. As Cas Mudde, a Dutch political scientist who specialises in political extremism, pointed out in the Guardian, the threatened new firewall around Wilders is not driven by revulsion at his ideology, but by anger at his “immature” posturing and pulling out of government after 11 months. That is what triggered this week’s general election.

Moreover, his anti-immigrant themes were adopted with gusto as the political centre ground shifted rightward. Even leftwing politicians echoed the scapegoating of refugees during the campaign. No wonder fear runs through migrant and minority communities as Ashifa Kassam reported.

‘On the outside, screaming in’

Yet, on the issues that voters said mattered most to them: housing, healthcare and the asylum system, the experiment with far-right rule is objectively a total flop. The PVV has nothing to show.

“The liberal-populist-far right coalition failed to address any of these challenges, and in some cases exacerbated them,” says Armida van Rij, senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform thinktank.

VVD party leader Dilan Yeşilgöz casts her vote. Photograph: Sem van der Wal/EPA

Anger (including among younger voters) about the national housing shortage helped Wilders to a seismic victory in 2023. Two years on the crisis is unsolved, with more than 80,000 people needing homes. It has simply become a bigger stick with which to beat asylum seekers, casually accused of jumping waiting lists.

“The coalition did nothing to address the housing crisis; there are no other new laws, reforms or achievements to speak of,” says Koen Vossen, political historian and the author of The Power of Populism: Geert Wilders and the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands. “You can drive faster than the 100km/h speed limit on a short stretch of highway in the polders. That is the only thing I can think of that they delivered on.”

The firebrand Wilders is ill-suited to governing, Vossen thinks. Although he has been a force in Dutch politics for 20 years, his comfort zone is “on the outside screaming in”.

“He lacks an organisation, because he doesn’t want one. He made poor ministerial appointments because he does not trust anyone – he had to cast around for party loyalists but they were amateurs, with no skills or experience.”

Give us boring

So after such epic failure, do voters conclude that populist ideologues can’t fix their problems?

For Mudde, that question overlooks the broader influence cast by Wilders. “Whatever the eventual outcome, one thing is already clear,” he wrote for the Guardian’s opinion pages. “Despite the far right’s evident failure in governing the Netherlands, it retains a magnetic hold over the country.”

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He blamed this stranglehold of ideas on a media that has become a “hostage” of the far right, and on a political class all too willing to “normalise” the populist agenda. And as Heather Stewart noted in a feature about populists crashing economies globally, failures are not always punished at the ballot box.

Yet, ahead of Wednesday’s election, pollsters noted a yearning for a return to stable, middle-of-the-road politics. “You hear it a lot,” says Vossen. “Give us back the boring old Netherlands with a stable government. Give us stable people that can do things.”

The Christian Democrat leader Henri Bontenbal even made “boring” his sales pitch in the campaign.

Trust destroyed

At the same time, Wilders’ failures are used by newer copycat, far-right parties, to promise that with better organisation, they could achieve the PVV’s goals.

More ominously perhaps, many Wilders fans blame not incompetence, but his enemies. “Among his core supporters the belief is widespread that he was blocked by the courts, by leftwing judges, by the deep state or whoever,” says Vossen. “This blame game is very Trumpian.”

Shutting him out of future coalitions could also be weaponised by the PVV as a repudiation of the popular will, a way to further corrode trust in democracy.

Vossen says the last two years have inflicted lasting damage. “The Netherlands was always a high-trust society, and our politics reflected that. But the last two years destroyed a lot of trust. When people look to the radical right, yes, they see that it has failed, but that has left them feeling even more dissatisfaction with the system.”

“It used to be rare to hear anti-institutional sentiment in the Netherlands. But it is now common. The foundations of democracy are being questioned. It is very disturbing.”

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