Madrid
Election polls in the Netherlands this Wednesday (22) suggest that the ultraright Party for Freedom (PVV) is the winner of the country’s parliamentary elections.
The PVV would have won 35 of the 150 seats up for grabs, compared to 26 for the Green Labor Alliance, 23 for the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) and 20 for the New Social Contract. Thirteen other parties have ten or fewer elected parliamentarians.
That result paves the way for the leader of the PVV, an antiIslam populist with a Donald Trumplike quiff named Geert Wilders, to try to become prime minister, but there is no agreement with possible allies for now.
The country is parliamentary and the head of government is the Prime Minister elected by the MPs after the parliamentary elections. Coalition negotiations can take months.
Perhaps to make himself more likeable, Wilders has tried to soften his image by giving up defending some of his most controversial positions of late. He recently stopped expressing some of his Islamophobic views.
But in a television debate on Tuesday evening (21) he said about immigration: “It was enough. The Netherlands can’t take anymore. We must now think of our own people first. Borders closed. No asylum seekers.”
The Netherlands has been ruled since 2010 by Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the VVD, a party that came third in this Wednesday’s elections. However, he announced his retirement from politics when he resigned several months ago after declaring that his government faced “irreconcilable” differences on immigration.
This is how the Netherlands is preparing to have a new prime minister after a decade. “I hope we don’t wake up tomorrow and have Wilders as prime minister. This is a nightmare,” Arie van der Neut, a centerleft architect from Amsterdam, told Portal
Justice Minister Dilan Yesilgoz, of Turkish descent and Rutte’s successor as head of the VVD, had hoped to become the country’s first female prime minister. “I don’t think anyone thinks Wilders would be a prime minister for everyone. He wants to close borders and exclude groups that he claims don’t belong in the Netherlands,” she said in the debate.
The elections are also about whether the Dutch are willing to continue to finance climate policy, such as the expensive construction of offshore wind farms, in the face of rising living costs due to wars.
One of the PVV’s ploys in this election was to question European Union rules and suggest how much the Dutch could benefit if agriculture and immigration in the country could be resolved internally. An ultraright coalition could soften plans to reduce livestock numbers and fertilizer use, which are strongly opposed by farmers.
Mark Rutte will remain in office until a new government is sworn in, probably in the first half of 2024.