Wilders’s anti-Islam, anti-EU Freedom Party slides in polls on eve of election
The prospect of Geert Wilders emerging as the winner of Wednesday’s Dutch election was thrown into doubt by two polls on the eve of voting that showed his anti-Islam, anti-European Union Freedom Party slumping to fifth place in one survey and third in another.
The final poll from I&O Research showed Wilders’s party at 16 seats in the 150-member lower house of Parliament, down four seats from a survey released just the day before. The last Ipsos survey before the election gave the Freedom Party 20 seats, a drop of three from last week. Both polls showed Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s Liberals gaining three seats — to 27 and 29 respectively.
The bulk of the polling by both companies was conducted after a diplomatic dispute erupted over the weekend between the Netherlands and Turkey, which Rutte was deemed to have handled well. While polling has a mixed reputation after failing to predict the outcome of the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president, the Dutch findings are the culmination of a trend in the past couple of weeks that has seen Rutte gradually overturning the clear lead that Wilders previously held in the polls.
The Freedom Party’s 16 seats in the I&O poll compared with a high of 33 seats in December.
It fell behind the centrist D66 party, the Greens and the Christian Democrats, all of which are possible partners for Rutte in the multiparty coalition that will have to be formed after the election to govern the Netherlands for four years. All the other main parties have ruled out working with Wilders.