On Wednesday, Dutch voters will go to the polls to vote in elections that will decide the makeup of the Tweede Kamer, the lower and most important house of the Netherland's parliament. It's a proportional representation system that uses party lists, so people won't be voting specifically for candidates: Instead, they will vote for a party.
Given the fractured nature of the Dutch political scene and the uncertainty of coalition building (more on that later), it's a little hard to say right now. However, polls do suggest that Mark Rutte, the current prime minister and leader of the pro-business People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), is one likely scenario.
“Islam and freedom are not compatible,” claims Geert Wilders, the Party for Freedom (PVV) leader who campaigns on banning the Quran, closing Dutch mosques, and ending immigration from predominantly Muslim countries. “Stop Islam,” the phrase that sits atop Wilders’s Twitter page, aptly summarizes his party’s platform. In December, Dutch courts found Wilders guilty of carrying his rhetoric too far, convicting him of discriminatory speech for rallying supporters in an anti-Moroccan call-and-response. Nonetheless, Wilders is a leading contender to receive the plurality of votes in the country’s parliamentary elections on March 15.
Mr Wilders, often referred to as the Dutch Donald Trump, wants to take the Netherlands out of the EU - a term known as 'Nexit'.
In the TV debate in Rotterdam, the current PM said to him: "You want Nexit. You want the Netherlands out of Europe. You know this will cost 1.5 million jobs. That would mean chaos for the Netherlands.
Then, of course, there's the anti-immigrant Party for Freedom (PVV), which is led by the mercurial Geert Wilders. That party had been doing very well in the polls until recently, when it started to slip.
Reference: The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Sky News, Express
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