PM Mark Rutte on course to beat Geert Wilders in Dutch election

**Mingle** · 03-16-2017, 01:33 AM

The Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, and his liberal VVD party appear to have comfortably beaten the anti-Islam Freedom party of Geert Wilders to become the largest in the new parliament, a usually reliable exit poll suggested.

In the first of three key European votes this year in which populist parties are seeking electoral breakthroughs, the VVD lost 10 seats but was still on course to return 31 MPs to the 150-seat parliament, the Ipsos poll predicted.

Three other parties – the centre-right Christian Democrats (CDA), liberal-progressive D66 and Wilders’ populist PVV – were projected to gain between four and seven seats each, all finishing up with 19 MPs.

“Our message to the Netherlands – that we will hold our course, and keep this country safe, stable and prosperous, got through,” Rutte told a cheering crowd of supporters at the VVD’s election night party.

The eyes of Europe had been on the vote, he added. “Many European colleagues have called me this evening: this was an evening when after Brexit and Trump, the Netherlands said ‘Stop’ to the wrong sort of populism.”

Relieved European politicians were quick to applaud the result. “Congratulations to the Netherlands for having halted the advance of the far right,” tweeted Jean-Marc Ayrault, the French foreign minister.

Wilders tweeted that since the VVD had lost seats and the PVV had gained, his party was “among the winners”, adding: “If all the losers like the VVD form a government, we need to have a strong opposition of winners like the PVV.”

The leftwing environmentalists of GreenLeft looked the big winners of the night, as the party was forecast to quadruple its number of MPs to 16. But the social democratic Labour party (PvdA), Rutte’s outgoing coalition partner, was forecast to slump to a historic low of nine seats from 38 in the current parliament.

The projected result would leave Rutte with a choice of coalition options, although coalition-building – with four parties likely to be needed – could take months: the average in the Netherlands is three months and the record more than 200 days.

Both Wilders and Rutte had framed the vote as a barometer for nativist populism. Casting his ballot in The Hague early on Wednesday, Wilders said: “Whatever the outcome of the election today, the genie will not go back into the bottle. People feel misrepresented.”

Wilders, who has pledged to “de-Islamise” the Netherlands and take it out of the EU, was widely seen as unlikely to enter government however he fared: no other main party will work with the PVV in coalition.

The vote was being keenly watched across the continent. After the UK’s vote to leave the EU and Trump’s “America first” upset last year, and before the French presidential elections in May and the German parliamentary poll in September, a first-place finish for the PVV would have rocked Europe.

In France, the far-right Front National leader, Marine Le Pen, is widely forecast to make the second-round runoff, while the Eurosceptic Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is on target to win its first federal parliament seats later in the year.

Informal coalition talks will begin on Thursday, although the process does not formally get under way until 23 March, when the new parliament sits for the first time. Rutte will be seeking a majority of 76 seats, probably with other mainstream parties including the CDA, PvdA and D66.

Turnout was 82%, the highest for 30 years, the exit poll showed, with 25% of voters in Amsterdam casting their ballot by midday, nearly double the figure in the previous 2012 election.

Rutte was also thought to have benefited from his cool handling of a fierce row with Turkey over the government’s refusal to allow Turkish ministers to address rallies of Dutch Turks before a referendum next month on plans to grant Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, sweeping new powers.

Erdoğan has reacted furiously to the Dutch decision, repeatedly accusing the government of behaving like Nazis, suspending high-level political contacts, threatening trade sanctions, and claiming the Netherlands was guilty of the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995.

In a campaign dominated by Wilders’ core themes of immigration and integration, the row “allowed Rutte to show himself as a statesman – and to send a Turkish minister packing”, said André Krouwel, a political scientist at Amsterdam’s Free University.

In a possibly unrelated incident, two big Dutch voting information websites were targeted by a cyberattack on Wednesday. Several Twitter accounts including those of the European parliament, the German newspaper Die Welt and Amnesty International were also hacked, apparently by pro-Erdoğan activists.

Voting earlier in The Hague, Sonja van Spronsen, a 45-year-old office worker, said she hoped the next government could produce a “good, convivial Netherlands. Not just arguing and complaining but with a good positive vision of how to move forward that we can all get behind.”

Ben Baks, a 60-year-old civil servant, said he had voted GreenLeft but wanted to see a rainbow coalition combining parties from left and right. “Whatever happens, we need a country that’s governable,” he said. “We need to send out a strong signal to other European countries.”

But Donny Bonsink, a 24-year-old chef, was for Wilders. “Islamisation in the Netherlands has to stop,” he said. “We’ve had governments trying to make immigration work for 40 years and all it’s brought us is problems. People are angry.”

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...dutch-election