Rob Jetten, 38 and openly gay, becomes new Dutch PM

(CN) — Centrist Rob Jetten was sworn in Monday as the Netherlands' youngest and first openly gay prime minister, ushering in a minority government that aims to raise military spending, build new towns and keep limits on immigration.

Jetten is a social media savvy 38-year-old whose center-left Democrats 66 are governing with the liberal People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy and the center-right Christian Democratic Alliance.

In snap elections last October, Jetten's party took a wafer-thin victory over the far-right party of Geert Wilders. The Democrats 66 took in just under 17% of the vote.

Regardless of the election outcome, Wilders was not expected to form a government after he oversaw a short-lived right-wing coalition following his shock win in 2023 elections. With his anti-Muslim and anti-Brussels rhetoric, Wilders is one of Europe's most controversial figures.

After long negotiations to build a coalition, Jetten was sworn in by King Willem-Alexander at Royal Palace Huis ten Bosch in The Hague. His government later held its first cabinet meeting.

The three parties in the coalition command just 66 votes in the 150-seat lower House of Representatives, the more powerful chamber in the Dutch parliament. To pass legislation, therefore, they will need to forge agreements with other parties, an arrangement that has been a fact of life in Dutch politics since 2010.

“All these governments have had to negotiate with other parties,” said Simon Otjes, an expert on Dutch politics at Leiden University, speaking by telephone.

Otjes said the Jetten government would likely find it easy to increase military spending.

“In the Netherlands, all parties from the center left to the radical right support increasing investments in defense,” he said. “There is a broad majority there.”

Jetten is proposing annual military spending increases until 2035 to ensure the Netherlands meets a new NATO target. Under pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump, the military alliance has called on each member to spend 3.5% of GDP on defense. In 2024, the Netherlands spent about 2% of its GDP on defense.

While boosting military spending may be easy, finding the money to pay for it promises to be very tricky, Otjes said.

“They've proposed very big budget cuts to health care and social security, in particular pensions, to pay for this,” Otjes said. “That is very unlikely to get a majority because both the radical right and the center left oppose this.”

Other options include raising taxes, particularly on the wealthy, and borrowing money, but these routes may prove very difficult too, he said. Still, he said it appeared clear the parliament would raise military spending.

He said Jetten also would likely find enough support in parliament to impose curbs on immigration.

The government said it “wants fewer asylum seekers to come to the Netherlands” and that it would “work with the European Union to make this happen.”

Among its proposals, it wants refugees to apply for asylum outside the EU and not after they arrive inside the bloc. It also wants to speed up deportations and get refugees to learn Dutch faster.

Otjes said such policies would likely garner the backing of parties on the right, including those on the far right.

In winning the election, Jetten picked up votes by shifting his party toward the right and away from its historically progressive stances, Otjes said.

“It used to be seen as very cosmopolitan, very much pro-immigration and during the campaign Jetten consciously decided to move his party away from that vote both in terms of his policy positions but much more in terms of his rhetoric,” he said. “It was mainly about him embracing a more conservative language and symbolism.”

Jettern's win was a major relief for European Union leaders and hailed as a defeat of the radical right following Wilders’ win in 2023.

Still, the election showed that far-right sentiment remains very strong in the Netherlands with the total vote for the far right actually increasing slightly since 2023.

“The parties on the radical right expanded their vote share in this election,” Otjes said.

Unlike previous elections, far-right voters drifted away from Wilders' Freedom Party and backed other parties, in particular the Forum for Democracy.

Otjes said this development was troubling because the Forum for Democracy is running candidates who are “openly neo-Nazis.”

During the campaign, Jetten also made a big impression by championing the idea of building new towns and even cities to tackle a housing crisis in the Netherlands.

In its platform, the coalition government said “the Netherlands needs lots more homes” and that it planned to set aside “30 places around the country for new neighborhoods or towns.”

“These places should be easy to reach by car, bicycle and public transport,” the government said.

But Otjes said Jetten's large-scale housing schemes seem unlikely to bear fruit. “This really was a campaign ploy,” he said, “and not terribly realistic.”

Jetten ran on a message of hope, going so far as adopting former U.S. President Barack Obama's slogan “Yes, we can” — or “Het kan wel” in Dutch.

Once derided as “Robot Jetten” for his mechanical delivery, he has since remade himself. In debates, Jetten stood out for his calm precision and forward-looking tone, emphasizing climate investment, housing and economic fairness.

A self-described “politics nerd” from the small Brabant town of Uden, Jetten came out as gay at a young age. He was a talented athlete who ran as pace-setter for Olympic champion Sifan Hassan and he has been in a relationship with Argentine hockey star Nicolás Keenan since 2022.

Courthouse News reporter Cain Burdeau is based in the European Union.

Follow @cainburdeau