Geert Wilders, the hard-right politician who won a shocking victory in the last Dutch elections, said on Wednesday that he was willing to forgo becoming the prime minister of the Netherlands — for now — in an effort to increase the chances of forming a right-wing coalition.
Long an anathema to mainstream politicians, Mr. Wilders has been at the center of coalition negotiations in the months since his decisive election victory in November. While it is now highly unlikely that he will be the next prime minister, other parties have broken a taboo that was in place since 2012: They will have to find a way to govern with Mr. Wilders’s Party for Freedom in some form.
“I can only become prime minister if ALL parties in the coalition support it. That wasn’t the case,” he wrote on social media. He added that he wanted a right-wing cabinet and less immigration.
“The love for my country and voter is big,” he wrote, “and more important than my own position.”
Mr. Wilders’s move increases the chance of a right-wing coalition in which his party will play a role, something that had long been unthinkable in the Netherlands, which has been regarded as one of Western Europe’s most liberal democracies.
The alliance probably will not be a traditional majority coalition, in which the biggest parties of the country form a majority in the House of Representatives, agree on a coalition arrangement and then start governing together.
Mr. Wilders has been negotiating for a way to form a government with the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, a center-right party that governed for the past 13 years; the Farmer Citizen Movement, a populist pro-farmer party; and New Social Contract, a new centrist party.
