2025 Netherlands

2025 Netherlands
Creators	Thomahawk2k (writer, coder) Zim (writer)
Genre	Historical Future (formerly) Alternate future
Candidates	People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) Farmer–Citizen Movement (BBB) Labour Pary-GreenLeft (LeftWard) Pieter Omtzigt Group (Group Omtzigt) Democrat 66 (D66) Party for Freedom (PVV) JA21, PvdD, Volt, SP, CDA, FvD, CU, SGP, DENK, BIJ1
Canon result	No canon result

2025 Netherlands, commonly abbreviated to "2025NL", is a mod created by Thomahawk2k, with additional help by Zim, Thomahawk's uncle, nina_96 and playtesting by Killeritch and others.

This mod is an international mod made to show what the 2025 Dutch general election could look like. The mod features and mentions Dutch politicians across the political landscape. The mod includes six parties and ten playable lead candidates; including the VVD (Mark Rutte and Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius), BBB (Caroline van der Plas), Omzigt Group (Pieter Omtzigt), LeftWard (Jesse Klaver, Ahmed Aboutaleb, and Frans Timmermans), D66 (Robbert Dijkgraaf and Sigrid Kaag), and PVV (Geert Wilders).

After the collapse of the Rutte IV cabinet in 7 July 2023, the mod has changed genre from future to alternate future.

Gameplay and features

The 2025NL mod revolves around, what was at the time of publishing, a possible future scenario of an election to the Dutch House of Representatives in 2025, main issues the country faces include a housing shortage, a cost of living crisis, pension reform, nitrogen emissions, the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War, government reform and migration.

The 2025NL mod introduces a coalition feature. Since it is impossible for one party to gain a majority of 76 seats in the Dutch House of Representatives, victorious parties need to form a coalition with other parties to gain one. Should the winner of the election take too long to form a coalition (by the player choosing to form an unviable coalition), another party may form a government instead. This means players need to be careful when choosing parties to form a government with, lest they get out maneuvered by one of their rivals despite winning the election.

Furthermore, the 2025NL mod is the first mod to feature a working d'Hondt method for allocating votes.

Pieter Omzigt's campaign features a unique mechanic that reflects the real-life Omzigt's struggle with burnout, where the player needs to avoid stress-inducing choices, lest their candidate suffers burnout and is forced to pull out of the election and thus lose it.

Both Omzigt and Caroline van der Plas have the option to hand the position of Prime Minister to another party candidate should they win the election.

After the D66/PVV expansion, a chart system was added to visualise the amount of seats and votes gained by each party during the election, and contrasting it with previous elections.

Launch and reception

The mod was officially released to the public around 18:30 UTC on April 25th, 2023. The mod was received with near-unanimous praise by the community, with one post which called the mod a "perfect example of a non-US election" reaching almost 100 upvotes on the TCT Reddit and beating out 1924b and 1948Red for the unofficial title of the best mod of April, 2023.

Broken mod loader (initial release)

When the mod was initially added to the mod loader, it was temporarily broken due to the name of the HTML being wrong (thanks to a spacebar). It was, however, fixed shortly afterwards.

Broken mod loader (D66/PVV expansion)

As tradition wills it for a TCT mod, the mod broke once again when the D66/PVV expansion were added to the mod loader. This resulted in the game occasionally crashing at the ending screen, after many stressful and painful hours, it was fixed and will remain so until the next time the loader is updated.

Legacy

After seeing the incredible reception the mod had recieved by the community, Thomahawk2k decided to work on an expansion making social liberal D66 and the right-wing populist PVV playable, which eventually was released on June 12th, 2023.

In the release post concerning the D66/PVV expansion, Zim announced that another mod was on its way, presumably another mod based on the Dutch elections. This was later confirmed to be the 2002 Netherlands mod, based around the 2002 Dutch general election, one of the most dramatic and controversial elections in Dutch history.

In July 2023, the Rutte-IV coalition collapsed, and elections were planned for the fall of that year. This event has effectively made this mod an alternate future mod.