The Netherlands is expected to swing decisively to the right in June’s European elections with 25 per cent of voters backing far-right leader Geert Wilders, in line with his big win in last November’s general election, according to a new opinion poll.
A win of that magnitude, suggests the poll by Ipsos I&O, would give Mr Wilders’s Freedom Party nine of the 31 Dutch MEPs, a big improvement on 2019 when the party won 3.5 per cent of the vote and failed to take a single seat in the European Parliament.
At home, despite winning 37 seats in the 150-seat Dutch parliament in November, Mr Wilders has so far been unable to form a coalition with other right-leaning parties – and has already reluctantly accepted he will not be the country’s first far-right prime minister.
Despite that inability to press home his domestic advantage the latest Ipsos European election poll shows the other main parties following in Mr Wilders’s wake, strikingly in line with their general election performance.
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The Labour-GreenLeft alliance led by former EU vice-president Frans Timmermans, is predicted to take second place with 20 per cent of the vote, giving them seven European seats, two fewer than their current combined total as separate parties.
The liberal VVD – led until last year by prime minister Mark Rutte, who has since been succeeded as party leader by justice minister Dilan Yesilgöz – is in third place with 14.1 per cent of the vote and six seats, up two on 2019.
Among the also-rans the Christian Democrats, centre-left D66 and the “progressive” Volt are on target to win two Strasbourg seats each – while the fundamentalist Christian SGP and the citizen-farmer BBB look set for one seat each.
Campaigning MP Pieter Omtzigt’s New Social Contract – which, like the BBB, has failed to match initial promise – looks unlikely to take one seat, according to Peter Kanne of Ipsos I&O.
In line with the general election the poll shows the key issues for voters on June 6th will be migrants and asylum seekers (for 46 per cent), climate change (for 33 per cent), and international insecurity (for 30 per cent). This is sharply at odds with a recent Eurobarometer internal EU public opinion survey that suggested climate change as the highest priority for 51 per cent of Dutch people.
As the European campaign gears up Mr Rutte, currently caretaker premier, warned on Friday that suggestions originating in the Czech Republic that Russian money was being distributed to some politicians in the Netherlands, Germany, France, Belgium, Hungary and Poland was “very worrying”.
“This shows how great the threat of foreign influence really is,” he said. “It’s a threat to our democracies, to free speech and to free elections.”
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