Dutch voters are set to head back to the polls for fresh elections before the end of the year, after the far-right PVV party withdrew from the coalition government over a migration policy bust up.

It was Geert Wilders, the leader of the PVV, who rolled the dice and pulled his ministers from the four-party government, throwing the Netherlands into months of political uncertainty. His aim is clear: "I intend to become the next prime minister," he said.

Outgoing Prime Minister Dick Schoof will lead a caretaker government in The Hague until a new vote is held, which experts believe will happen no sooner than October.

The consideration now is whether Wilders, one of Europe's longest-standing players in far-right politics, can plot a path to finally becoming the prime minister, or whether he's now a busted flush in the eyes of the Dutch electorate. 

"That's the million-dollar question," Armida van Rij, Senior Research Fellow at Chatham House's Europe Programme, told DW.

With multi-party coalition governments being the norm in the Netherlands, there are two main aspects needed to succeed politically in the EU's fifth biggest economy: votes from the public and the ability to build alliances with other parties.

Responsibility shirker?

Having first taken a seat in parliament in 1998, Wilders spent over a decade on the far-right fringes until surging support saw his party first prop up a coalition government led by Mark Rutte in 2010, before pulling out in 2012.

He has a growing reputation as a politician who walks away when things get tough.

"This all looks bad on Wilders," said Adriaan Schout, a Senior Research Fellow at the Netherlands-based think tank, Clingendael. "He supported the Rutte government, and he walked out back then in 2012 [over new austerity measures], and that's been that's always stuck to him. Doing it again now looks very bad in the eyes of the public."

Wilders' PVV party currently holds more seats (37/150) than any other party in the Dutch parliament after surprise success in the 2023 election. Polls indicate declining popularity since PVV joined the government but suggest that his party would still be the biggest in the parliament if elections were held now.

"Voters may now actually reward Wilders, even if he pulled the plug, due to discontent over the lack of migration policy changes," said Pieter Cleppe, Editor-in-Chief of BrusselsReport.eu, a right-leaning magazine covering EU politics.

"Forming a government without Wilders will then only be possible by taking over at least part of his anti-immigration agenda," he told DW.

But now, with the former coalition parties expressing their "fury" over this week's government collapse, if Wilders were to succeed in the upcoming elections, the other parties may well call his bluff and refuse to join a coalition with him, let alone allow him to lead as prime minister.

Toughest Asylum Policies Ever

The political battle over migration came to a head when Wilders went all-in and, at the end of May, proposed a '10-point plan' on asylum which would bring in some of the most draconian migration policies in Europe.

It included military units stationed at national borders, a complete end to accommodation being provided for refugees, a temporarily halt on family reunions for asylum-seekers who have been granted refugee status and sending Syrian refugees back home despite any risk of persecution.

The refusal of the coalition partners to sign onto his plan immediately caused Wilders to pull his ministers from government.

"The plan itself is deeply problematic because it violates a number of EU laws and international law provisions, namely, the right to asylum," said Davide Colombi, a researcher in the Justice and Home Affairs Unit at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS).

"Migration and asylum are actually instrumentalized in European politics," continued Colombi in an interview with DW. "There seems to be a tendency to normalize unlawful policy proposals across the EU, not only in the Netherlands, as if migration and asylum were something outside of the law."

Far-right Fragmentation

Europe is now seeing a once-unified far-right starting to fragment, not along ideological fault lines, but under the constraints of the democracies they operate in.

France's Marine le Pen is banned from running in the 2027 presidential election due to embezzling EU funds and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's government agenda on migration has been hobbled by domestic courts.

"In Sweden and Denmark, rightwing populists have been able to successfully affect policy, but the Netherlands does not have a tradition of minority governments," said Cleppe from the right-leaning magazine. "Wilders could have prepared better for government by attracting more mainstream figures into his political movement."

The shuffling of the Dutch political deck begins again with the elections. The coming months will see political parties jostling for position and many will to try to edge Wilders out of the game.

Wilders himself so far appears defiant and looks set to double down on selling his anti-immigration policies to the public, rather than hedging his bets and trying to build alliances with other political parties.

Edited by: Matt Pearson