Increasingly, it is beginning to feel like 2025 could mark the beginning of a new wave of left-wing momentum similar to the one that emerged a decade ago. In 2015, a surge of left-wing enthusiasm swept across the West with the election of the Syriza government in Greece, the rise of Podemos in Spain, Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the UK Labour Party, and Bernie Sanders launching his unexpectedly strong campaign for the 2016 US presidential primaries.
The wave may be smaller this time around, but the signs are undeniable: in Germany, Die Linke delivered a surprisingly strong performance in the federal elections, and for the past month, global attention has focused on Zohran Mamdani, who won the Democratic nomination for the New York City mayoral race, and stands a very good chance of winning the general election later this year.
Jouke Huijzer is editor-in-chief of Jacobin Netherlands and a PhD candidate in political science at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
The political arena in the Netherlands, however, remains largely impervious to this renewed leftist enthusiasm. The country’s last significant left-wing electoral victories date back to 2012, and with new elections scheduled for October following the early collapse of the far-right coalition government in July, the Left appears unlikely to regain traction or spark a broader political shift.
The Dutch Left has struggled to build momentum for nearly a decade. After the government’s collapse, the traditional centre-left — the Greens (GroenLinks) and the Social Democrats (PvdA) — decisively voted to fully merge into a single red-green party by the coming spring, moving beyond their joint candidate list established in 2023. As a result, there will no longer be a genuine social democratic party in the Netherlands, while the Party for the Animals (PvdD) will become the clearest voice on environmental issues. It remains highly unclear, however, whether the current strategy will revive the centre-left, nor whether this clearing of the left-wing field will translate into gains for the more radical parties.
The Dutch Polycrisis
Theoretically, left-wing parties in the Netherlands have no shortage of issues with which to expand their base. In a way, it is remarkable that asylum policies continue to dominate political debate, given how many issues have a much bigger impact on the daily lives of the Dutch population. Most salient is the housing crisis: many young and precarious workers are unable to find or buy a home after housing prices soared and social housing was sold to private investors who made sky-high profits. The cost of living has also risen due to higher energy prices and inflation, while wages have stagnated and labour protections have been eroded — especially for migrant workers, many of whom live in precarious, often inhumane conditions. Yet government responses remain deliberately inadequate.
The government insists on more austerity despite low debt and no major budget deficit, slashing spending on healthcare, education, and the energy transition, while enabling private equity to penetrate those same sectors once shielded from market forces. The result of right-wing government policies (or the absence of any policy) is that wealth inequality in the Netherlands now rivals that of the US, making it the most unequal country in Europe
Yet the Left fails to politicize the crises. Instead of seizing every opportunity to hold right-wing parties and doctrines responsible for their emergence, they present themselves mostly as more competent at handling them. Staggering inequalities, poverty levels resulting in children going to school without breakfast or lunch, or the unfolding genocide in Gaza do not trigger the outrage one would expect from the Left. In fact, for the past year the left-wing opposition leader was most outraged when, in a deliberate provocation, a far-right minister refused to sign-off on royal distinctions for employees working with asylum-seekers.
Much the same holds for global warming. At the Glasgow COP26 summit in 2021, then Prime Minister and current NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte had a clear message to fight climate change: “Action, action, action, implementation, implementation, implementation.” Rutte’s government reached a domestic climate agreement in 2019 but never met the climate goals set in the Paris 2015 climate agreement — neither before nor after 2019. The Greens, however, did not respond by calling for votes of no-confidence — an annual practice of the far right over its signature issues — but proudly proclaimed that reaching a climate agreement with the government was its biggest achievement.
The Left has been less successful in inserting its agenda into the political debate, partly due to an increasingly hostile, right-leaning media landscape.
Pollution of land, water, and air is a major issue, with growing reports on its health and environmental risks. Most notable is the “nitrogen crisis”. Driven by banks and government policy, intensive livestock farming doubled in the 2010s, causing nitrogen levels in Dutch air to threaten key natural areas like heathlands.
Right-wing governments avoid firm action fearing to impinge on its core constituency, while the Left fails to identify and target the capitalist interests behind pollution. Since the Left does not blame the responsible parties and politicians, the Right exploits the issue through folkloristic campaigns backing farmer protests that deny the crisis or flat-out reject respecting regulations. Inadequate policies, padded with subsidies for livestock farming, passed with the necessary support from the more radical left Socialist Party (SP).
Caving In
The fact that the nitrogen crisis that ultimately benefits right-wing parties was also caused by right-wing mismanagement reflects a broader pattern: certain issues — like asylum policy, labour migration, petty crime, and international warfare — serve the Right politically when left unresolved, fuelling calls for tougher measures, subsidies to capital, and increased military spending.
The Left has been less successful in inserting its agenda into the political debate, partly due to an increasingly hostile, right-leaning media landscape. Outlets that were once more left-leaning have shifted right or adopted a “balanced platform” model where all views are treated more or less equally. In turn, the Left has struggled to preserve or build its own influential media to shape public opinion and amplify underrepresented voices.
The inability to shape the political agenda and public discourse is also tied to an attitude shift in centre-left leadership since the late 1980s and early 1990s, when a more “combative” stance towards capital that helped the Left thrive in the 1970s gave way to compromise-oriented politics. As in Germany, Social Democratic as well as Green Party leaders began prioritizing competent management and pragmatic solutions to a given set of problems within the system, as is characteristic for the Red-Green governments from that of Gerhard Schröder (1998–2005) to Olaf Scholz (2021–2025).
In this way, they began defending a status quo they once challenged, with little electoral or policy gains in return — in the case of the Dutch Greens, not even becoming part of a government coalition. Yet in terms of political attitude, it marked a step from defining to solving problems, from instigating to transcending (class) conflicts, and from challenging to guarding the political order — mainly against brazen attacks from the far right.
Political scientists remain sceptical of the merger. It unites electorates with different priorities, making it likely that some factions will feel alienated.
Underlying this pivot was the implicit assumption that our political systems are sufficiently capable of solving problems as long as established procedures are respected. The central conflict for the Left was no longer to fight capital and its rampant effects on people and nature, but to protect the political order. Effectively, this translated to a permanent willingness to negotiate lesser-evil policies with the mainstream right, hoping to preclude them from cooperating with the far right.
Cutting Their Losses
While the dominance of the conciliatory Left dates back to the late 1980s, recent developments on the Left were mostly in response to the political missteps of the 2010s. Most significant was the PvdA’s decision to join a coalition with the free-market conservative VVD from 2012 to 2017, accepting austerity measures they had previously opposed. Attempting to appear decisive in times of crisis, they struck a deal in just six weeks, abandoning the conflict with their prime adversary they had harped on during the election campaign. Yet the strategy backfired: in 2017, the PvdA lost 29 of its 38 seats, marking one of Europe’s worst centre-left electoral defeats of the decade, second only to Greece’s PASOK.
Losses by the PvdA were barely offset elsewhere on the Left. Only the Greens rebounded from their 2012 defeat, gaining from four to 14 seats. The SP failed to capitalize on social democracy’s collapse into the governing coalition, even losing one seat.
Surprisingly, the PvdA’s collapse did not prompt deep internal debate or leadership change — despite the party leader, Lodewijk Asscher, having served as vice-prime minister in the unpopular cabinet. Prominent members insisted the issue was poor communication, not flawed decisions. Some suggested merging with the Greens as a path forward.
The other two Dutch left-wing parties, however, seem ill-prepared to take over the leadership on the Left in similar fashion to Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France or Jeremy Corbyn in the UK.
By 2021, the PvdA had not recovered, and the Greens also lost momentum, winning just nine and eight seats respectively. With no prospect of joining a coalition, many in both parties concluded that closer cooperation — or even a merger — was the natural thing to do. For the Greens, it could finally offer a route into government, a longstanding objective that they, unlike their sister parties in neighbouring Belgium and Germany, had never achieved.
In both the First Chamber elections in spring and the Second Chamber elections in autumn 2023, the Greens and Social Democrats merged their candidate lists and formed a joint parliamentary caucus. So far, the strategy has yielded limited results. They gained no seats in spring and won only 25 in the autumn — an improvement from their combined 17 seats in 2021, but just two more than in 2017, which was then seen as an electoral disaster. In the 2024 European elections, they lost one seat compared to their combined 2019 total.
Merging party lists helps maintain visibility in polls and makes the two parties harder to ignore in coalition talks. The parties argue their combined strength makes cooperation with them inevitable. However, the scenario in which joining a government further composed of right-leaning parties — likely the only viable option — would lead to another collapse like in 2017–2021 has received little consideration.
Political scientists remain sceptical of the merger. It unites electorates with different priorities, making it likely that some factions will feel alienated, turning to other parties or abstaining from voting altogether. Opponents may also exploit internal divisions, forcing party leaders into positions unpopular with at least one part of the electorate. These risks were largely ignored by party leadership. Since 2021, they have shifted from tempering to nourishing enthusiasm for the merger, while sidelining deeper ideological debates.
In some respects, the merger served as a distraction, allowing PvdA leaders who could be blamed for the 2017 defeat to retain influential positions. Despite talk of renewal, there’s little evidence of a real shift in leadership or ideological direction. While advocates present the merger as a logical evolution, it is fair to say the PvdA never seriously considered an alternative to the path that plunged the party off the electoral cliff in 2017.
More Radical Alternatives?
Just like in 2023, the combined list of the Greens and Social Democrats is led by former EU Commission Vice-President Frans Timmermans. Although polls suggest he may perform slightly better than last time, he is unlikely to inspire anything resembling genuine enthusiasm. A 64-year-old with nearly three decades in Dutch and European politics who once supported the Iraq War — and was also a minister in the cabinet punished electorally in 2017 — is an improbable figure to ignite fresh momentum.
The other two Dutch left-wing parties, however, seem ill-prepared to take over the leadership on the Left in similar fashion to Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France or Jeremy Corbyn in the UK. The SP is still recovering from a streak of electoral defeats under Lilian Marijnissen (2017–2023). During her tenure, the party adopted more culturally conservative stances, arguably akin to the approach pursued by Sahra Wagenknecht in Germany. These include an emphasis on integrating migrants who are already in the country and limiting future migration, supposedly to protect domestic wages and the interests of migrants’ home countries.
There were also differences, however: Wagenknecht openly challenged Die Linke’s leadership, claiming to represent its true base, unlike its mainstream-oriented leaders. Marijnissen, by contrast, was more willing to compromise her positions for office-seeking reasons — for example, by not excluding the VVD as a coalition partner on principle for the first time. These shifts sparked internal tensions and led to a rift with the Socialist Party’s youth organization.
Its continued accommodation of dominant right-wing narratives means the coming election is unlikely to mark any ideological turning point in the Netherlands.
Its current leader, Jimmy Dijk, has reintroduced some of the combative spirit in the party but has not succeeded in breaking decisively with the earlier course in the way that Die Linke managed to do ahead of the last German election. As the SP continues to emphasize calls to limit migration and asylum seekers, it is polling only slightly better than the five seats to which the party shrank in 2023. The party insists on positions that public opinion surveys indicate are popular, even if it alienates activists — and despite the broad lesson of 2015 that, if anything, surges in radical-left support hinge on socioeconomic messaging.
The other more far-left party, the Party for the Animals, also faces internal turmoil. Some months before the 2023 elections, an internal argument erupted between the party’s board and its leader over democratic control by the membership. This resulted in the resignation of the board as well as an electoral loss of half of their seats. While the party has recovered somewhat in the polls, its recent support for increased military spending led to a new wave of internal dissent within the party.
No Turning Point
Despite the highly fragmented Dutch political landscape resulting in many (historically) left-wing parties, none of them appears able to take a clear left-wing stance on today’s most salient issues. The centre-left has yet to break with its conciliatory approach toward their traditional adversaries, recently reaffirmed when Frans Timmermans proudly adopted tougher rhetoric on migration while his caucus supported increased military spending. When Timmermans challenges right-wing parties, it is not because they prioritize capital over workers or the planet, but because they threaten the political system.
More radical parties will not be able to counter the mainstream Left where it defers to the Right. This is either because they try to sound tougher themselves, like the SP on migration and asylum, or because their differences are more about degree than principle. A more effective approach would be to articulate its signature issues on its own terms and draw attention by playful or provocative action. Reviving the Left requires it to build its own outlets and prioritize ideological change over short-term gains if the latter require swerving to the right.
Based on the latest polls, the Left may perform better than in the series of electoral wipeouts of the past decade, but any surge in support would require an unexpected catalytic event. In any case, its continued accommodation of dominant right-wing narratives means the coming election is unlikely to mark any ideological turning point in the Netherlands.