Setback for far-right as Dutch opt for stability
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EUROPEAN leaders breathed a sigh of relief yesterday as the pragmatic Dutch plumped for the status-quo, voting Liberal Prime Minister Mark Rutte back into power even though the far-right shot up into second place.
“A vote for Europe, a vote against extremists,” Margaritis Schinas, spokesman for EU Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker, said in a tweet.
After the Brexit blow and Donald Trump’s victory in the US, Wednesday’s general election was closely watched across a continent seeking to take the temperature of the rise of populism.
It was “a victory for common sense and a great start for Europe’s election season,” said Holger Schmieding, chief economist with Berenberg bank.
The fact most Dutch voters had “rebuked the siren songs of the populists may help a little” with upcoming polls in France and Germany, he said.
After flirting for some months with putting anti-Islam MP Geert Wilders at the helm of the country of 17 million people, in the end Dutch voters opted for stability.
With 93 percent of votes counted, Rutte’s Liberal VVD party was seen as emerging as the largest party for the third time running with 33 seats.
That is eight seats down on the last elections in 2012, but puts him in pole position to form the next coalition government to rule one of the largest eurozone economies.
The Netherlands had “said ‘stop’ to the wrong kind of populism,” Rutte told cheering supporters late Wednesday. “The next task was “to unite the country ... (and) succeed in forming a stable government for the next four years.”
Wilders however had reason to crow, having boosted his number of seats to 20 from 15 in the last election.
But Hajo Funke, from the Otto Suhr political sciences institute at Berlin’s Free University, said: “The fascination for the rise of right-wing populism in Europe is over.”
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