After election day, the clips of the international press flows in beside tweets, emails and comments from friends abroad. I barely tweeted my happiness of living in Utrecht (where GroenLinks became the biggest party), when the flood came back: "what are you talking about? The newspapers here reports the winning of extreme right wingers! How can you be happy to live in Utrecht?" So here three points describing the dutch political landscape as I see it.

-Elections are photographs, not videos. The snapshot from 3 March shows one of the ugliest faces of the Netherlands indeed. The full video is much less clear, though.

It is true that the elections of two days ago can be described by the impressive win of radical right winger Geert Wilders. Wilders politics are as bad as they can get: in a recent communicate from the scientific bureau of his party, the polish migration towards the netherlands is explained by the muslims that are -obviously- overtaking Poland. I fail to have words to describe this level of hate mixed with nonsense. The politics of Wilders are xenophobic and, even worse than that, stupid. For him all problems of europe today start and end with muslims. And there is no doubt that his repeated plea has gained him adepts. But Wilders won elections in only two cities, from the hundreds of NL.

The political dynamics are more than a plain increase of the right. The centrist christian democrats, after having a hideous week of loosing the governing coalition, remain the biggest party in the country. The social democrats, even after loosing many of the votes gained in the last election, remain being a force that is unmissable in the government-forming conversations that are taken place in each city right now. Last but not least, a centrist left and a centrist right parties (GroenLinks and D66) have booked  victories to a scale far bigger than the one of Wilders.

The question is which coalition will rule the country after the elections of 9 June. Two obvious options are on the table: a centrum right wing, with extreme right wingers as allies, and a centrum left wing, with moderate lefties as minor partners. The Christian and the Social Democrats will remain being big parties the 10 of june, but not big enough to run the country at their will. How much will Groenlinks (the left wing green party), D66 (a democratic liberal party) and the PVV (Wilders' party) will grow will facilitate a coalition ruled by the Christians going right, or a coalition ruled by the Socials staying in the center. The possible growth of the liberals, the party where Wilders started his shenanigans more than a decade ago, will move the balance of power to one side... or the other. Christian democrats and extreme right wingers in one side, and social democrats with liberals and -perhaps- the greens or the liberal democrats of D66 on the other side. That is the choice that The Netherlands has today.

-GroenLinks won with a leader that is attractive to the middle and well-off class. We need to complement her soon. It is impossible to ignore the disgruntled majority of dutch citizens.

Groenlinks had, back in the nineties, a high moment of popularity. We where almost at the point of being invited to form national government, when the the right wing tide of 2000 begun and we were kicked back to the junior league of politics. Our popular leader quit, and his follower took a long time to gain the measure of the dutch elector. But she did. Femke Halsema enjoys today the spotlights. Her nuanced and still sharp style of debate has won the accolades of a politically-interested public tired with the devaluation of the traditional political class on one side and the shrill and scary politics of hate on the other side. But beware: the public that today supports Halsema is a public that, by far and large, enjoys great levels of welfare. The devaluation of Christian and Social democrats is due to an increased discontent in a vast sector of the dutch population that has not shared the increased level of life quality of the nineties, that is scared by the looming economic crisis and -even when is difficult to acknowledge- looks with discontented eyes the growing migrant dutch population. Europe at large, and The Netherlands in particular, is wondering if her mix of socialism and capitalism will raise to welfare the lower classes. It happened once, in the late eighties and the nineties. Will it happen again? The lower classes today do not see -yet- the greens as a political force capable to improve their condition. If GroenLinks want to cash the goodwill that Femke Halsema has won the last year in hard votes and real political power, GroenLinks needs a complement to Halsema. A figure that not only connect our political agenda with the educated middle class, but also explains and sells our election program to the disgruntled elector. As a matter of fact, a great deal of responsibility lies right now in two -by far and large under the radar of the public attention- groups. One is the candidate commission that  will determine who is joining Femke Halsema in our electoral ticket. Is this commission capable of recruit or support a figure that complements Femke? The other group is integrated by the many negotiation commissions that are right now starting to work out local government coalitions. If GroenLinks enters the government in the relevant cities of The Netherlands with visible points of her own, we will have something to sell in June.

-The Netherlands is experiencing the last wave of the radical right wing tide that flooded Europa in the last decade.

For many of the political observers away from The Netherlands the results of the local elections of 3 of March tell that the xenophobic right wing is in the march. But that is nothing new. In the whole europe the xenophobic right wing has been making progress since at least a decade, and in some cases since long before. Most of those processes have reached the end of their political capital. Berlusconi, Haider, Rajoy, de Winter, Blocher... All figures that are not likely to win elections again. The extreme right wing has not been capable to manage a government anywhere. They have been capable of mobilize great discontent an fear, also in the Netherlands. Here, the experiment with right wing mavericks at the government failed already a decade ago, with the first cabinet lead by Mr Balkenende. It is still possible that in The Netherlands they will have another chance, after June. But just looking at their election programs, at the quality of their cadres and at the viability of their ideology in a world that becomes more and more connected, diverse and dynamic...  let us know that the exclusionist political project of the xenophobic right is doom to fail. The question that occupies ourselves today, those of us that believe to be progressive enough to embrace an uncertain, challenging but still desirable future, is how much damage are we going to let them make. We might stop them in June, or they will stop later.

GroenLinks today needs Femke to make her newly gained position sustainable. GroenLinks today needs fast agreements of government in the cities where we won the elections, with recognizable points. In about two months from now we should be capable to tell the person that voted for GroenLinks: "this is what we are doing for your city". And far more important, to the person that has not yet voted GroenLinks that message is unmissable. And GroenLinks today needs yet another face, or a team, capable to tell that other elector, that angry and frustrated worker from any ethnicity, that isolating us from the world is no option. That to improve our troubled society we need to open ourselves up to new challenges, to new realities. Wilders want us to go back. We need to tell the ones that suffer today that the future can be better than that.