NETHERLANDS: Dutch voters go to the polls today amid signs that the late Mr Pim Fortuyn's far-right party could form part of the next government.
The latest opinion poll predicts that the List Pim Fortuyn will win 18.5 per cent of the votes, making it the second largest party after the Christian Democrats.
Mr Wim Kok's ruling Social Democrats are expected to win just 16.5 per cent of the vote, compared with 29 per cent at the 1998 election.
Formal campaigning was suspended after Mr Fortuyn's assassination last week but the parties have exchanged insults in the past few days. List Pim Fortuyn's chairman, Mr Peter Langendam, has accused parties on the left of fomenting anti-Fortuyn sentiment that led to his murder.
"The bullet came from the left, not from the right," he said.
Mr Kok, who is retiring as prime minister after the election, reacted with outrage.
If the Social Democrats perform as badly as expected today, they will pay the political price for making deep cuts in spending on health, pensions and education to balance the national budget. Despite the popular discontent that fed support for Mr Fortuyn, the Netherlands remains one of Europe's economic success stories.
The economy has grown by 3 per cent each year since 1982. Unemployment has fallen from 11 per cent in 1983 to 2 per cent today.
If the latest opinion poll is accurate, the next government is likely to be a coalition among the Christian Democrats, List Pim Fortuyn and the free market VVD. The mainstream conservative parties want to cut taxes and increase spending on the Netherlands's deteriorating schools.
Most political analysts predict that List Pim Fortuyn will secure at least four posts in the 12-member cabinet, even though few of the party's candidates have any experience.
In a full-page newspaper advertisement yesterday, the party thanked the Dutch people for the extraordinary outpouring of grief that followed Mr Fortuyn's murder.
Mr Volkert van der Graaf (32), the animal rights activist charged with killing Mr Fortuyn, has made no statement to police since his arrest a few minutes after the murder. Prosecutors have denied a newspaper report which suggested that Mr van der Graaf, who is a vegan, was interviewed in connection with the murder of a farmer some years ago.
The motive behind Mr Fortuyn's murder remains unclear, not least because the environment was a marginal issue in his political programme. Mr Fortuyn won popularity with his strident opposition to immigration and inflammatory statements about what he regarded as the menace of Islam.
