EU BREATHES SIGH OF RELIEF.

But populism isn’t showing signs of waning

AMSTERDAM •When Donald Trump was elected president in November, his Dutch equivalent, Geert Wilders, celebrated the arrival of a “Patriotic Spring” that would lift anti-immigrant nationalists to power across Europe. That uprising failed to materialize in the Netherlands.

Instead, the populist breakthrough Wilders had predicted for 2017’s run of elections starting in his homeland, followed by France, Germany and perhaps Italy now looks no more likely than a centrist, pro-European revival.

The year could end with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte still in power, the unabashedly reformist, pro-European Union Emmanuel Macron in the Elysée Palace, and either Angela Merkel or the still more EU-friendly Martin Schulz in the chancellery in Berlin, breathing signs of life into the bloc’s tired Franco-German engine.

“The Netherlands shows us that the breakthrough of the extreme right is not inevitable and that European progressives are growing in strength,'' Macron wrote in one of a stream of tweets from relieved politicians around Europe.

The euro soared after the first exit poll indications of a Rutte victory before losing its gains as any sense of euphoria faded.

Wednesday’s vote was encouraging mainly for what didn’t happen. An upset win for Wilders would have eroded faith in opinion polls that currently suggest the hard right National Front’s Marine Le Pen will lose in the second round of French presidential elections in May. That’s an election with far greater potential repercussions for the European Union and the bloc’s $17 trillion economy. Le Pen, like Wilders, has pledged to try to take her country out of the euro and threatens all sorts of trouble for the EU should she win.

“There was a narrative, which was very strong, that exaggerated the strength of the populist right after Trump and Brexit,” said Cas Mudde, a Dutch political scientist and authority on populism at the University of Georgia, in the U.S. “That narrative can switch pretty fast.”

Celebrating his victory in the early hours of Thursday, Rutte said voters had rejected "the wrong kind of populism.''

Still, the results offered little evidence that Wilders, whose Freedom Party won four more seats than in 2012, populism or the concerns that feed it have gone away.

Rutte’s Liberals lost seats compared to last election, while his former Labour party coalition partners had their worst night on record.