Millennial Leaders Won the Dutch Elections

A quiet generational shift is transforming politics.

D66 leader Rob Jetten is pictured looking happy as he walks in a government building. November 10, 2025, 11:45 AM Comment icon View Comments ( )

International coverage framed the Oct. 29 Dutch election, like every Dutch election , as a contest between the far right and broadly centrist forces. But what really set this election apart was generational turnover.

Older millennials, 38- to 44-year-olds, now hold the levers of power in Dutch politics, and their policy agenda bears the imprint of their generation’s experiences in the 2000s and 2010s. The politicians who thought defense spending was there to be cut whenever they needed fiscal space are gone; the fiscal policy orthodoxi

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