• Military Menu                       

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Industry
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

Dutch Election Tests Anti-Immigrant Sentiment Amid Dispute With Turkey

RFE/RL March 15, 2017

Dutch voters have been casting ballots in an election that is considered an indicator of anti-immigrant and nationalist feeling and comes amid a dispute with Turkey.

Prime Minister Mark Rutte's center-right People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) is competing with the PVV (Party for Freedom) of anti-Islam, far-right politician Geert Wilders, as well as other parties, for the 150 seats in parliament.

The March 15 election is the first of three this year seen as tests of antiestablishment sentiment in the European Union and the 28-member bloc's chances of survival after Britain's vote to leave the EU and Donald Trump's election as U.S. president in 2016.

Wilders voted at a school in The Hague and told reporters that his party was a winner in the election regardless of the outcome because "everybody is talking about our issues."

Rutte, casting his vote, said that the election was an opportunity to stop the "domino effect of the wrong sort of populism."

Opinion polls indicated a 3 percentage point lead for Rutte's party over Wilders' party, but the surveys did not fully take into account tense relations with Ankara.

Pollsters expected turnout to be higher than in the last general election in 2012, when final participation was about 74 percent.

Over the weekend, the Netherlands barred Turkish ministers from addressing rallies promoting a referendum to enhance Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's powers. He accused the Dutch of behaving like Nazis, prompting an angry rebuke from Rutte.

Early indications are that the dispute with Turkey may have helped both Rutte and Wilders.

Erdogan continued his verbal attacks on the Netherlands on March 15, falsely claiming that the Dutch -- rather than Bosnian Serb forces -- killed thousands of Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995.

"They are the ones who massacred over 8,000 Bosnian Muslims...in the Srebrenica massacre," Erdogan said. In fact, lightly armed Dutch UN peacekeepers were overrun and failed to halt the slaughter.

Wilders has vowed to "de-Islamicize" the Netherlands. He has virtually no chance of forming a government given that all the leading parties have ruled out working with him, but a PVV win would still make waves across Europe.

The vote in the Netherlands will be followed by a presidential election in France, with far-right politician Marine Le Pen likely to make the run-off in May.

Germany holds a general election in September. Right-wing Euroskeptic party Alternative for Germany, which has attacked Chancellor Angela Merkel's refugee policy, has been gaining in popularity.

With reporting by Reuters, AP, and AFP

Source: http://www.rferl.org/a/netherlands-election-wilder-rutte/28371366.html

Copyright (c) 2017. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.