People in the Netherlands are voting in a high-stakes snap election dominated by immigration and housing issues that will test the strength of the far right, which is on the rise across Europe.
Voting began at 7:30am (06:30 GMT) on Wednesday, and polls suggested anti-Islam lawmaker Geert Wilders and his far-right Freedom Party (PVV) are on course to win the largest number of seats in the 150-member House of Representatives. However, three more moderate parties are closing the gap, and half the electorate is undecided.
After the results are known, parties have to negotiate the makeup of the next coalition government in a system of proportional representation that means no party can reach the 76 seats needed to govern alone.
The key question is whether other parties will work with Wilders – known as the “Dutch Trump”, a reference to the United States president – who sparked the elections by pulling the PVV out of a fractious four-way coalition and collapsing the previous government in a row over immigration.
All mainstream parties have ruled out a partnership with him again, finding his views too unpalatable and viewing him as an untrustworthy coalition partner. It seems likely that the leader of the party that polls second will most likely become prime minister.
Reporting from The Hague, Al Jazeera’s Step Vaessen said the election campaign had been “dominated by calls to limit immigration” with “some violent protests against refugee centres”.
In a pre-election interview with the news agency AFP, Wilders said people were “fed up with mass immigration and the change of culture and the influx of people who really do not culturally belong here”.
“The future of our nation is at stake,” he said.
Rob Jetten – leader of the centre-left D66 party, which wants to rein in migration but also accommodate asylum seekers – told Wilders that voters can “choose again tomorrow to listen to your grumpy hatred for another 20 years or choose with positive energy to simply get to work and tackle this problem and solve it”.
Frans Timmermans, a former European Commission vice president who now leads the centre-left bloc of the Labour Party and Green Left, said in the final debate before the elections that he was “looking forward to the day – and that day is tomorrow – that we can put an end to the Wilders era”.
Beyond immigration, the housing crisis that especially affects young people in the densely populated country has been a key campaign issue.
The electoral commission has registered 27 parties and 1,166 candidates running for the House of Representatives.
That means a big ballot paper because it bears the names of all the parties and the candidates on each party’s list.
Polls close at 9pm (20:00 GMT).
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