The Return of Centrism

The middle wins when extremists stumble

(Dutch D66 leader Rob Jetten at the Dutch parliament in The Hague on October 30th 2025, following parliamentary elections [Piroschka Van De Wouw, Reuters])

Centrism is making a cautious comeback this year in some places as voters wake up to the inability of extremists to govern effectively.

This trend has not broken the strategic paralysis, which we sketched in a September 2^nd essay, that still prevails globally. Nor is centrism (yet) driving the kind of protests — pirate, bamboo and otherwise — we summarized earlier this week.

The return of the political middle is strongest (so far) in countries with proven democratic credentials, which have experienced the downside of polarization, where political leaders are pivoting towards the centre to broaden their bases.

The most obvious recent example is the D66 victory in the Netherlands. D66 stands for Democraten 66 — a progressive, socially liberal, centrist party formed by a group of politically unaligned intellectuals in 1966.

Their leader Rob Jetten is still forming a coalition and is not yet prime minister. To win, he highlighted the far-right PVV’s inability to govern since 2023; pursued ‘can-do’, ‘big tent’ politics; and pivoted gently away from identity issues towards stronger border controls, while remaining resolutely pro-European.

Nicușor Dan in Romania and Maia Sandu in Moldova held the same centrist ground earlier this year – only after acting decisively to exclude hard-edged forms of Russian corruption and illegal interference from their national elections.

Jetten’s win most closely resembles Mette Frederiksen’s in Denmark in 2022, when she formed a grand coalition of her social democrats with the right-of-centre liberal conservative Venstre party and Denmark’s moderates. This centrist model — excluding extremes, while staying tough on borders — has held up in Copenhagen for three years, and may offer a blueprint for Jetten if he manages Dutch egos adeptly.