I'm so sorry. The reporting I was reading earlier didn't make it sound as bad as it was.

Centrist D66 party projected to win Dutch election ahead of far right
reuters.com/world/dutch-vote-e…

"We've shown not only to the Netherlands, but also to the world that it is possible to beat populist and extreme right movements," Jetten told the crowd.

And this from the NYT:

Dutch Voters Deliver Major Setback to Far-Right Party of Geert Wilders

But it noted: "Other Dutch far-right parties seemed to gain much of the ground that the PVV had ceded, with two parties, JA21 and Forum for Democracy, poised to pick up 11 seats — nearly as many as Mr. Wilders’ party had lost, according to exit polls."

And: "Voters also delivered a setback to the left-wing bloc made up of the Green and Labor parties."

Wilders has pulled ahead again as of right now, with a difference of a few thousand votes. Apparently we are still waiting for the votes from abroad to be counted, which means it might shift back to D66 again, but ... yeah.

Preliminary results, etcetera, but all this is still way too close for comfort, and, if you ask me, not really a victory 😕

Oh, I was reading stuff yesterday that suggested it was much more positive than it sounds too. So sorry.

In a desperate bid to find a positive, the fact it's being reported as a move to the middle might be *something*. One of the problems in the UK is that the media portrayal as the right being what most people want skews everything that way. People hearing that the centre is winning might counter that. Maybe.

/clutching at straws

@eclectech @jeridansky Wilders lost a good chunk of the popular vote, and is at this moment, with more votes counted and definitive results being confirmed, back in second place, but the FvD party and its spinoff, JA21, saw big gains; FvD more than doubled, from 3 to an expected 7 seats, while JA21 is expected to go from 1 to 9 seats.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forum_fo…

Wilders lost 11, the other fash trash parties gained 12, which basically means that, if this ends up being the final result, we have shifted rightward once again 😒

@eclectech @jeridansky It's basically impossible to set up a centre-left coalition based on these results, as it would not have a majority, and any other combination that wants to avoid the outright far-right parties needs the VVD, who campaigned on GroenLinks-PvdA being 'the radical left', and ruled out governing with us.

So it's going to be one heck of a battle to form a stable government, again 😩

As a measure of just how silly this is; GroenLinks-PvdA was the only party that campaigned on NOT cutting healthcare funding to meet defence spending goals. We got rewarded with less than 13% of the vote 🗳️

@jeridansky I have no words to say that really, other than "oooooof".

Possibly "fuck" would be appropriate too 😩