The Netherlands' early parliamentary elections took place in a competitive environment, with state institutions taking important steps to increase resilience and prevent digital threats. However, improvements to monitoring and responding to digital threats, to independent oversight of campaign finances, and to the participation of persons with disabilities in campaign activities are needed.
These are some of the main conclusions from the final report on the 29 October early parliamentary elections published by the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR). The ODIHR expert team specifically focused on the conduct of the election campaign, including on social media, and on campaign finance and its oversight.
The report provides eight recommendations to align the conduct of the election campaign, its financing and oversight more closely with OSCE commitments and other international standards.
Key recommendations include:
- Establishing a clear legal and institutional framework to monitor and respond to online and digital threats to elections.
- Adopting legislation to clearly set out the mandate, appointment process, resources, staffing and enforcement powers of the Dutch authority for political parties to guarantee its independence and effective oversight of campaign finances.
- Digitizing the candidate registration process to make it more efficient.
- Improving the accessibility of campaign information, materials and activities for persons with disabilities.
- Increasing social media accountability by ensuring timely responses to violations of platform policies and greater transparency about any mitigation measures and content moderation decisions.
- Introducing expenditure limits for electoral campaigns to prevent excessive funding.
- Strengthening campaign finance transparency by requiring dedicated campaign bank accounts and post-election reporting of campaign expenditures.
The ODIHR mission also assessed the country's efforts to implement previous recommendations. The ODIHR mission evaluated the follow-up to recommendations from the 2017 and 2021 parliamentary elections and concluded that 3 recommendations had been fully implemented, 2 were mostly implemented, and 2 were partially addressed, while others remain outstanding. A full list is on p. 14 of the report.
All 57 participating States across the OSCE region have formally committed to following up promptly on ODIHR's election assessments and recommendations. The ODIHR's electoral recommendations database tracks the implementation of previous recommendations across the OSCE region.
