Early this month, Jacobin Netherlands celebrated the publication of its first issue with a keynote speech by Peter Mertens, former leader of the Belgian Workers’ Party. Mertens told a packed hall in Amsterdam: “Everytime I meet people from the Global South they say, ‘Oh, you are from Europe, it must be hard with the extreme right there.’ Yet I believe,” Mertens continued, “that the main problem in Europe is not the extreme right but the lack of self-confidence of the Left.”

Mertens had every right to state this. His Belgian Workers’ Party is one of the few (radical) left-wing parties that has the wind in its sails: it is currently on track to become the largest party in the Belgian elections next year, with other nominally left-wing parties having a good shot at securing a majority of seats. Things could not be more different in the Netherlands after last Wednesday’s general election.

The Dutch left has become more volatile since the 1990s and in decline electorally at least since the early 2000s. It hit an all-time low in 2021 when all the left-wing parties combined only reached a total of 33 of 150 seats. They matched that result in last week’s election. Worse, three smaller but more radical parties lost at the cost of the newly created center-left alliance between the Green Left party and the social democratic Labour Party, PvdA, forming a combined electoral list known as GL-PvdA.