Food for Thought: “Politics and Society in the Aftermath of the 2025 Dutch Elections”
On 6 November, FSW colleagues gathered for the latest Food for Thought lunch meeting, focusing on “Politics and Society in the Aftermath of the 2025 Dutch Elections”. The event was opened by Joop van Holsteyn, who highlighted the purpose of the Food for Thought series: to create space for informal academic exchange over lunch.
The first speaker, Tom Louwerse, provided the audience with five observations about the results of the Dutch elections. He highlighted that despite the high changeover of seats between parties, there was more stability when you look at the three main political blocks: the left-progressive, centre-right and far right. Voters change their behaviour mostly within blocks, except for D66 and JA21 which are able to attract voters from two blocks.
Tom also reflected on the formation of a new government. While in numerical terms many coalitions are possible, various blockades between parties mean that there seems to be a stand-off between two potential coalitions that could be explored, one preferred by D66, another by the VVD. Given that in March 2026 municipal elections will take place, this could mean that these parties are weary to give in before that as they will not want to be seen compromising too easily and potentially lose support.
Following this, Ruthie Pliskin highlighted four psychological concepts that may have shaped voting patterns in the election, namely uncertainty, social norms, political polarization, and paradoxical thinking processes.
- Uncertainty: shares complex relations with motivations to enact social change through elections, with people who generally experience more uncertainty being more supportive of change, but increased uncertainty within people predicting more resistance towards change.
- Social norms: are powerful motivators of the kind of change people want, with institutional norms boosting the natural spread of similar norms in society, with strong implications for legitimizing voices that may have been seen as extreme in the past.
- Growing polarization: means there’s much greater interpersonal hostility between people with opposing views, pointing to the immense challenges for forming a “broad center” coalition, per the goals of D66 leader Rob Jetten.
- Paradoxical thinking: finally, recent research has demonstrated that radicalization by political elites (i.e., the governing coalition) can actually lead to moderation of their supporters’ prior attitudes, in a process known as paradoxical thinking. This may help explain why most of the people who voted in 2023 for the parties that later joined the coalition, in they changed their vote, voted in 2025 for more moderate parties.
Future events
The next Food for Thought gathering will take place on 2 December and will focus on Resilience in Youth. Registration is still possible: Food for Thought lunch meeting: Resilience in Youth - Leiden University.