Post by Admin on Mar 15, 2017 18:53:48 GMT
The prospect of Geert Wilders emerging as the winner of Wednesday’s Dutch election was thrown into doubt by two polls on the eve of voting that showed his anti-Islam, anti-European Union Freedom Party slumping to fifth place in one survey and third in another.
The final poll from I&O Research showed Wilders’s party on 16 seats in the 150-member lower house of parliament, down four seats from a survey released just the day before. The last Ipsos survey before the election gave the Freedom Party 20 seats, a drop of three from last week. Both polls showed Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s Liberals gaining three seats -- to 27 and 29 respectively.
The bulk of the polling by both companies was conducted after a diplomatic dispute erupted over the weekend between the Netherlands and Turkey, which Rutte was deemed to have handled well. While polling has a mixed reputation after failing to predict the outcome of the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president, the Dutch findings are the culmination of a trend in the past couple of weeks that has seen Rutte gradually overturning the clear lead that Wilders previously held in the polls.
“There is support among voters of all parties for the performance of Mark Rutte” in the Turkish crisis, I&O said in a commentary to its poll. It found 62 percent of voters backing the way Rutte acted, including 59 percent of Freedom Party backers, with only 10 percent of all voters supporting the way Wilders performed.
The Freedom Party’s 16 seats in the I&O poll compared with a high of 33 seats in December. It fell behind the centrist D66 party, the Greens and the Christian Democrats, all of which are possible partners for Rutte in the multiparty coalition that will have to be formed after the election to govern the Netherlands for four years. All the other main parties have ruled out working with Wilders.
The Ipsos poll saw the Christian Democrats moving into second place ahead of the Freedom Party. But there are differences of as many as five seats between the estimates for some parties in the the two latest surveys, and voters may still be swayed by party leaders’ performances in the final televised debate Tuesday evening.
Something dramatic is indeed happening in Dutch politics right now. It’s just that Wilders and his party, the PVV, have far less to do with it than you might expect.
Like Dutch politics in general, this is complicated and not especially sexy. The Netherlands has a pluralist system where 12 parties (yes, 12) are currently represented in parliament; multi-party coalition governments have been the rule for over a century.
Despite the chorus of worried thinkpieces, the number of buyers for Wilders’ PVV remains static in an extremely busy political marketplace. In the last poll available, the party is set to score 14 percent of the vote. That’s an improvement on their 2012 election score of 10.1 percent, but down on their 2010 showing, where they got 15.4 percent.
That still places Wilders’ party as the second largest in the Dutch parliament, three points behind the center-right VVD’s 17 percent. Wilder’s Party might feasibly even end up with more votes than the VVD. This significant position, if it plays out in actual votes tomorrow, nonetheless place it almost neck and neck with many other political contenders. Four other parties are also on course to score 10 percent or more. All of them are to the left of Wilders’ PVV (which admittedly isn’t saying much) so talk of Wilders maybe “winning the popular vote” is misleading.
