Dutch election: Vote is key test for populist support

But Wilders, lately seen as a much bigger threat to Rutte than he turned out to be, has warned that the prime minister “has not seen the last of me!” “I’m not done with Rutte yet!”

The final days of campaigning were overshadowed by a diplomatic crisis between the Dutch and Turkish governments over the refusal of the Netherlands to let two Turkish government ministers address rallies about a constitutional reform referendum next month that could give President Recep Tayyip Erdogan more powers.

– The Euro was broadly steady Wednesday as investors took the view that there was little event risk in the Dutch elections.

At current count, Rutte’s VVD party will take 33 of the 150 available parliamentary seats. The third domino which would knock on to the French election, then Germany?

Wilders, a member of the Party for Freedom, argued during his campaign that Islam poses a threat to the people of the Netherlands.

Compared to 2012, CDA gained six seats, D66 won seven more seats, and SP lost one seat while GroenLinks became the biggest victor with a gain of 12 seats.

In the Dutch election about 80 per cent of citizens cast a vote.

Ahead of the vote, all the mainstream parties ruled out working with Wilders, who wants to close all mosques, ban the Quran and seal the Netherlands’ borders to asylum seekers and immigrants from Islamic countries.

If Wilders does win, it will be a challenge to find other parties willing to join him in forming a new coalition government.

Welcome to the Guardian’s live blog of the 2017 Dutch elections – we’ll be covering developments throughout the night and into tomorrow, bringing you live news from the Netherlands as it happens.

France chooses its next president, with Ms Le Pen set to make the second-round run-off in May, while in September right-wing eurosceptic party Alternative for Germany, which has attacked Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door refugee policy, will probably win its first lower house seats. Twenty-eight parties ran and 13 appear to have crossed the.67 percent threshold needed for at least one seat.

The result is well down from his 2010 high of 24 seats while support for the two most pro-EU parties, the progressive D66 and GreenLeft, was way up.

Politicians from both countries were quick to congratulate the Netherlands for staving off populist policies which overturned the USA election and the U.K.’s European Union referendum.

Coalition talks are now expected to last weeks or possibly months, with most of the main parties having already stated they would not work with the PVV.