Election triumph puts anti-Islam Wilders in line for Dutch Cabinet role
The Freedom Party of the anti-Islam MP Geert Wilders emerged as the third force in Dutch politics last night, more than doubling its number of seats in Parliament in the country’s general elections.
Exit polls predicted that Mr Wilders would command 23 seats, up from 9 — pushing the Christian Democrats, led by the outgoing Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, into fourth place.
With the Dutch Labour Party running neck-and-neck with the cost-cutting right-wing Liberal Party (VVD), it was unclear who would form the next government.
2nd UPDATE: Far Right Gains Most In Dutch Elections.
AMSTERDAM (Dow Jones)—An exit poll in the Dutch elections Wednesday indicates a draw between the Liberal Party and the Labor Party, with the far-right Freedom Party gaining most, setting the stage for difficult coalition talks to form a majority in government.
Both the center-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, more commonly known as the Liberal Party, led by Mark Rutte, and the Labor Party led by the former mayor of Amsterdam, Job Cohen, are set to have 31 seats each out of 150 parliamentary seats, according to the exit poll from Synovate, a research agency.
In the previous government, a three-party coalition of center and left parties that collapsed in February after internal disagreement over the deployment of Dutch forces in Afghanistan, the Liberal Party held 22 seats while the Labor Party had 33 seats.
The biggest gainer of Wednesday’s elections, however is the Freedom Party, led by Geert Wilders, who was branded an extremist by the U.K. government for his anti-Islamist rhetoric, which is set to grow to 22 seats, from the current 9.