What’s your reaction to the Dutch election result?

Although he drove through unpopular austerity measures over the last four years, the Dutch economic recovery has gathered pace and unemployment has fallen fast under the prime minister.

He also denounced the fact that there is no “unified position” in relation to the refugees in the European Union, arguing that this lack of common policy has helped these far-right parties to “feed fear”. The third domino which would knock on to the French election, then Germany?

The first of three important elections this year in Europe was taking place on Wednesday, with voters in the Netherlands heading to the polls to elect a new government.

It turns out he needn’t have fretted too much.

Mr Macron said: “The Netherlands is showing us a breakthrough for the extreme right is not a foregone conclusion and that progressives are gaining momentum”.

The man all the foreign journalists had come for, Wilders, did not look happy after the results came in and he had every reason not to. As a coalition is bound to be needed, Wilders’ chances of becoming Prime Minister are therefore vanishingly slim. He captured 13 percent of the vote Wednesday, compared to 10 percent in the previous elections, and boosted his seats by a third.

Mr Rutte has called on Dutch voters to use the election to draw a line in the sand over the spread of populism. By the early hours of the morning, we will know the rough size of each of the 28 parties on the ballot box. The vote has been split.

The PVV, the center-right Christian Democrats CDA, and the leftist liberals D66 were expected to garner 19 seats each.

“I consider it a victory for Europe, because you see a lot of countries where the populist parties are becoming bigger and bigger”, Infrastructure and Environment Minister Melanie Schultz van Haegen told AFP.

He told a rally in Amsterdam: ‘We led an extraordinary campaign, and I’m very happy with the result.

The already dramatic campaign, which also saw Wilders temporarily suspend his campaign last month over a security leak, took another twist in its final days.

Wilders’ run was seen as the latest test of a wave of populism to sweep across Europe, extending as far as the United States across the Atlantic Ocean.

An exit poll in the Netherlands shows Jesse Klaver has led his Green Left party to a historic victory, turning it into the largest party on the left wing of Dutch politics for the first time. The center-right Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA) of Sybrand van Haersma Buma has been shown to be nearly even with front-runners, garnering around 22 of the 150 seats in the Dutch parliament. Unlike Marine Le Pen in France he is not building an actual movement, preferring to keep tight control over the party Wilders is himself the only member of.