Dutch sector leaders have described cautious optimism after the victory of centrist liberal party D66 in the recent general election, in which the far-right, populist Party for Freedom (PVV) also lost seats.

While both D66 and PVV will have 26 parliamentary seats, D66’s total is an improvement of 17 compared with the 2023 election, while PVV has lost 11 seats. D66, which won the most votes, will now have the first opportunity to form a government; leader Rob Jetten is favourite to become prime minister, while PVV’s Geert Wilders is likely to be shut out.

Caspar van den Berg, president of Universities of the Netherlands, said although “it’s a little bit early to know what the coalition is going to look like and what its priorities will be”, universities were “hopeful that the new government will prioritise education and research more than the previous government”.

D66 “have really embraced” universities’ call for the Netherlands to “grow towards a 3 per cent of GDP investment in research and innovation”, said van den Berg, while the party has pledged that “they won’t enter a government coalition that wants to cut back on the whole educational sector”.

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Both the previous coalition and the caretaker government formed in the wake of its collapse have introduced drastic cutbacks, with higher education and research budgets cut by up to €300 million (£260 million) per year, funding reduced for international student support and early career research grants and university compensation for inflation cut by up to €25 million.

Despite the encouraging election results, “we still have to deal with the cutbacks that the previous government has introduced”, said van den Berg. “We’re currently experiencing the consequences of [those cuts]. Big research projects have been halted, programmes can’t be sustained and our sector is less attractive internationally.”

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After the general election, Barend van der Meulen, higher education professor at the University of Twente, predicted that universities “may expect a government that is more sympathetic to higher education as a key institute in a democratic and well-functioning society”.

However, the next coalition “cannot undo” three significant challenges facing the Dutch sector, he said: demographic decline in the 17 to 25 age group, the growing gap between universities’ salary costs and income and restrictions on international students.

“For the universities of applied science, the decrease of Dutch first-year bachelor students between 2024 and 2031 is expected to be 6 per cent,” van der Meulen said. “For the research universities this is expected to be more than 11 per cent.”

“Salary costs have increased faster than income,” he added, “In the meantime, the development of student numbers stagnated. [You don’t need to be a] rocket scientist to expect the budget crashes we see.”

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The recent years of political instability have been “really harmful” for higher education, van den Berg said. “What you want is [consistent] funding by the government so that others can make well-informed decisions about moving here to do research or to study, and also for companies to make investments in research and innovation in our country. In that sense, uncertainty is always bad news, and we’ve had a lot of that."

“What we want is for the new government to prioritise that stable research and innovation funding, growing towards 3 per cent, and that should be a long-term commitment, because we’ve had short-term [funding boosts] in the past, but they are taken away very easily again.”

As demographic shifts see fewer young people enter the labour market, said van den Berg, the next government must introduce a “national talent strategy” that encourages graduates to “stay home and contribute here” while also attracting and retaining international talent. “We are already lagging behind in the global race for talent, and we need to reverse that development,” he said.

emily.dixon@timeshighereducation.com