At the jubilant election-night celebration for the centrist D66 party in The Hague my Dutch wasn’t good enough to understand the party leader’s rousing speech to his activists. But it wasn’t hard to make out words like “Brexit!”, “Trump!” and “populism!” And when I interviewed Alexander Pechtold afterwards for a Radio 4 documentary, Can The Centre Hold?, he was adamant that the man he had to thank for his party’s election success and likely part in the new governing coalition was the President of the United States.

“There was one game changer,” he told me, “and that was Donald Trump. I thank him because everybody thought, "Do we really want this in Europe, in the Netherlands, in our country which is so tolerant? No, we don’t want those kind of populist policies, we want reason." And people in The Netherlands voted for reason.”