Dutch to Get `Nice Surprise’ in Election, Candidate Wilders Says

Published just before the eagerly anticipated debate on the current affairs show EenVandaag got under way, the poll showed both Mr Rutte’s Liberals and Mr Wilders’s Freedom Party on 24 seats each in the 150-seat parliament, just one day before polling booths open on Wednesday.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte on Monday clashed with his main rival Geert Wilders of the far-right Party for Freedom (PVV), as they laid out starkly opposing visions of their country’s future in an election campaign now consumed by a diplomatic row with Turkey.

Earlier this month, it was announced that Facebook was adding its fact checking facility to news articles in the Netherlands, a level of scrutiny that already exists in the U.S., France and Germany.

He accused the prime minister of lying to the Dutch voters for the past five years and scaremongering over Brexit. 2002 saw an unprecedented wave of right-wing populism emerge, with pioneer politician Pim Fortuyn at the forefront. “We are building a movement that is stronger than any parties in Netherlands”. It is telling, therefore, that the Gallup World Poll shows that the fraction of Dutch people in the bottom income quintile who agree that corruption in government is widespread ballooned from 24 per cent in 2011 to 59 per cent previous year. Here’s the quote. He says, if you can sacrifice Turkish-Dutch relations for an election on Wednesday, you’ll pay a price.

Since the 1990s, certain election trends in Europe have been noted, such as lower voter turnout, decline in loyalty to establishment parties and the increasing voice of smaller, populist parties.

These are the kind of voters who were crucial to Leave’s victory in the European Union referendum, so it will be interesting to see whether their concerns about unemployment and their pessimism about corruption in the Netherlands translate into greater support for populist parties, including the Freedom Party.

Two months ago he was convicted of hate speech in a trial over a promise to reduce the number of Moroccans in the country. Wilders, who calls for such policies as banning the Quran and taxing women who wear hijabs, has co-opted the campaign narratives through his appeals to ethnonationalism and his calculated use of the media. Historically very religious and socially conservative, the party has become more secular in recent years.

The similarities between Geert Wilders and US President Donald Trump extend further than their trademark blonde hair.

Wilders’s success however is not going to bring him into government, because none of the other centrist parties wants to collaborate with him. But, the authorities “simply wanted to make sure to all Dutch voters that there can’t be any shadow of a doubt about the reliability of the outcome”.

The 2017 Dutch election has taken on a significance for the global media that we haven’t seen for a long time here in the Netherlands.

If Wilders wins the Dutch election in March, it would likely spark the beginning of a turbulent election season in Europe. Far-right French candidate Marine Le-Pen of the National Front (FN), who is campaigning for France’s own Frexit referendum, has a legitimate shot at the French presidency.

The outgoing prime minister repeated his pledge that he and his Liberal VVD party would not work with Wilders and the PVV “but he still would be able to form a new government” in coalition talks. “It assumes that the rest of the European Union will remain intact, while if the Netherlands leaves there is a large chance that is not happening”. It is admittedly hard to put much confidence in polls after they vastly underestimated the populist votes in the United Kingdom and the US. “So obsess over Europe, where immigration has created more problems and birthrates are more dire”.