This is just in: the full board of the Dutch Pirate Party defected to a brand-new intellectual extreme right-wing party in protest against their own fetish-model-turned-privacy-activist party leader. And no, I’m not making this up.

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Contrary to all expectations the VVD+PvdA Rutte II government is likely to reach the end of its natural life. Elections are slated for 15 March 2017, and it seems likely government will not fall before that date. This would be the first time since 1998 that government survives unscathed until the next regular elections.

Now that all politicians have returned from recess they are starting up their electioneering; not yet with a fully-fledged campaign (that will happen only in February or so), but with positioning their party to go into the elections as a favourite. Most political moves of the next seven months will be aimed squarely at 15 March.

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All polls agree that 50Plus will enter parliament after the elections, though they disagree on its exact number of seats: 1, 2, or even 3. In addition, Peil.nl thinks the Pirate Party is going to win one seat, although the other pollsters don’t agree.

In this entry we’ll take a closer look at new parties in parliament, and discover three rules:

1. New parties generally win more than one seat.
2. Pollsters never miss a new party: if a party gets 0 seats in the polls, it gets 0 seats in parliament.
3. The opposite is not true: pollsters frequently give seats to parties who don’t win any.

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