DUTCH POPULIST STUMBLES.
WIN FOR RULING PARTY
Dutch voters responded to their prime minister’s plea to “make a point” to the world Wednesday as they turned back the rising tide of populism in Europe and America by rejecting the campaign of the hard-right Geert Wilders.
In an election watched nervously in Brussels and major European capitals for fear of another anti-establishment victory, Mark Rutte had said it was up to the Netherlands to hold the line.
“It is the third election after Brexit, after the American elections,” he said as he cast his vote at a school in The Hague. “This is a chance for a big democracy like the Netherlands to make a point — to stop this toppling over of the domino stones of the wrong sort of populism.”
Exit polls suggested his call had been heeded. The Ipsos polling company gave Rutte’s party 31 of the 150 seats in the lower house of parliament, compared with 19 seats each for three other parties, including that of Wilders. Weeks or months of coalition talks are expected to follow.
For the two-time prime minister, the outcome indicated that an economic recovery and his hard-line handling of a diplomatic dispute with Turkey over the past week won him late support.
But for Wilders, the outcome is a stinging disappointment despite representing a four-seat gain from 2012. He fell far short of the 40 seats he was slated to win at the height of his poll popularity in December 2015. In the months leading up to the election, he had set his sights on his party becoming the country’s largest.
In the final days of the campaign, Rutte had warned of “chaos” if Wilders was allowed into government, urging his voters to the polls. High turnout figures in cities suggested he was successful in that appeal.
His impassioned plea for tolerance came at the end of a bitter campaign with Wilders pressing his anti-immigrant agenda — at one point using the phrase “Moroccan scum” — and a ferocious diplomatic row with Turkey that further raised the temperature of the immigration debate.
As he cast his vote, Wilders, who campaigned on a referendum on EU membership, said: “The message is that many people want to regain national sovereignty, they don’t want to be dependent on the political elite whether that is in their own capitals or in Brussels.”
Rutte tried to counter Wilders’s cruder appeals over immigration with a hard line message of his own, warning migrants in an ad campaign to “be normal or be gone.”
Wilders will also have to contend with a reawakening of the anti-populist Left embodied in the figure of Jesse Klaver, a dynamic 30-yearold of Moroccan, Dutch and Indonesian descent who leads the progressive GreenLeft party.
“We’re gaining momentum,” said Klaver. “And I think that’s the message we have to send to Europe. You can stop populism.”
According to the Ipsos exit poll, the Greens leaped from four seats to 16 in parliament after a strong campaign by the charismatic Klaver, turning it into the largest party on the left wing of Dutch politics for the first time.
“This is a fantastic result for us, a historic victory,” GreenLeft chairwoman Marjolein Meijer said.
She said the result showed there is “very fertile ground in the Netherlands for change and a positive and hopeful story.”