Dutch voters head to polls in a knife-edge election focused on housing and Wilders

Audio By Carbonatix

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — Polls opened across the Netherlands on Wednesday in a close-run snap election called after anti-Islam lawmaker Geert Wilders brought down the last four-party coalition in a dispute over a crackdown on immigration.

The campaign focused on migration, a housing crisis and whether parties will work with Wilders in a new coalition if his Party for Freedom repeats its stunning victory from two years ago.

The vote comes against a backdrop of deep polarization in this nation of 18 million and violence at a recent anti-immigration rally in The Hague and at protests across the country against new asylum-seeker centers.

In The Hague, a steady stream of commuters stopped to vote at a polling station set up at the city’s central railway station, next to the Dutch parliament building. Voters could cast their ballots at venues from city halls to schools, but also historic windmills, churches, a zoo, a former prison in Arnhem and the iconic Anne Frank House museum in Amsterdam.

Polls suggest that Wilders’ party, which is calling for a total halt to asylum-seekers entering the Netherlands, remains on track to win the largest number of seats in the 150-seat House of Representatives, but other more moderate parties are closing the gap and pollsters caution that many people wait until the very last minute to decide who to vote for.

“It hasn’t been this tense for a long time,” Wilders said late Tuesday on Dutch news show Nieuwsuur after leaders held a final debate.

Polls close at 9 p.m. and broadcasters publish an initial exit poll immediately followed by an update a half hour later.

The Dutch system of proportional representation all but guarantees that no single party can win a majority. Negotiations will likely begin Thursday into the makeup of the next governing coalition.

Mainstream parties have already ruled out working with Wilders, arguing that his decision to torpedo the outgoing four-party coalition earlier this year in a dispute over a crackdown on migration underscored that he is an untrustworthy coalition partner.

Rob Jetten, leader of the center-left D66 party that has risen in polls as the campaign wore on, said in a final televised debate that his party wants to rein in migration but also accommodate asylum-seekers fleeing war and violence.

And he 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, the former European Commission vice president who now leads the center-left bloc of the Labor Party and Green Left, also took aim at Wilders in the final debate, saying he is “looking forward to the day — and that day is tomorrow — that we can put an end to the Wilders era.”

Wilders rejects arguments that he had failed to deliver on his 2023 campaign pledges despite being the largest party in parliament, blaming other parties for stymying his plans.

“If I had been prime minister — which I earned as leader of the biggest party — then we would have rolled out that agenda,” he said.

Wilders backed away from becoming prime minister during negotiations after the last election because he did not have the support of potential coalition partners.

The election could see a reformist party, New Social Contract, that won 20 seats at the last election and joined the outgoing coalition, all but erased from the Dutch political map, with polls predicting it may lose all or almost all of its seats. It's slump in popularity is an apparent backlash against the party's decision to join a coalition with Wilders and follows the departure of its popular leader, Pieter Omtzigt, who quit politics in April, citing his mental health.