Not since the end of World War II has the political landscape in the Netherlands changed so drastically.
The country's two-party ruling coalition lost its majority in parliamentary elections Tuesday, and Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers is stepping down.Dutch newspapers' headlines ranged from "a political earthquake" to the "greatest political cataclysm in the history of the Netherlands," to describe the results.
In the future, there will be no more truly broad-based parties left in the Netherlands. Both the Christian and the Social Democrats only managed to win barely a quarter of the votes each, making them marginally stronger than the two smaller right-wing and left-wing parties.
As in Italy, the Dutch political center has shrunk considerably, with the trend going clearly in favor of smaller fringe parties.
A projection revealed that a retirees' party, formed just two months ago, enjoyed surprisingly strong support, that the Socialist Party will enter parliament for the first time and that even the radical Calvinists made gains.
But the gains by the right-wing liberals of the Popular Party for Freedom and Democracy were much less than originally feared by the big parties. A year ago, the openly xenophobic party won 8 percent in a survey.
"We can only say that, luckily, the current leaders of the (Popular) party still don't know how to mobilize their followers," remarked Hans van Mierlo, leading candidate of the Social-Liberal Democrats, on election night.
But 12 years of Lubbers' "no-nonsense" brand of politics left many Dutch citizens disappointed.
According to them, nothing has changed for the better in the Netherlands despite drastic cuts in the country's famed social welfare programs and higher taxes. Instead, unemployment and crime are both on the rise, as is the number of asylum-seekers.
In the 1970s, charismatic Social Democratic Prime Minister Joop den Uyl spoke of restructuring society, social justice and the politics of peace. Typical buzzwords in today's parliament are "budget deficits" and "social security cuts."
"The Netherlands has become much more boring under my government," admitted Lubbers a few months ago.
When his Christian Democrats' Party experienced its worst election defeat in the history of the organization Tuesday, Lubbers simultaneously announced that he would be a candidate for succeeding Jacques Delors as president of the European Commission.
A cartoon in the Wednesday edition of the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant showed Lubbers, briefcase in hand, leaving a house that was on the verge of total collapse.