"It's not the
economy, stupid," Professor Gerrit Voerman of the University of
Groningen said, tweaking the campaign message Bill Clinton used in his
successful 1992 march to the White House. Instead, Voerman said, "It's
about identity." [...]
In
the Netherlands, pollsters predict that Prime Minister Mark Rutte's
People's Party for Freedom and Democracy will lose about 15 of the 40
seats it holds in the 150-seat House of Representatives. Wilders' party,
which currently has 12 lawmakers in the chamber, is on track to become
one of the biggest, if not the biggest, parliamentary faction, despite a
recent decline in polls.
However,
Wilders' hard-line anti-Islam, anti-immigration platform and rhetoric
has driven away potential coalition partners among mainstream parties,
meaning that he is unlikely to be able to form a government even if he
wins the popular vote in this country whose elections all but guarantee
coalitions.
Wilders'
one-page election manifesto leads off with two "us-against-them"
themes. The Party for Freedom pledges to "de-Islamize" the Netherlands
by shutting all mosques, banning the Quran and halting all immigration
from majority Muslim nations. It also commits to remove the Netherlands
from the European Union, which it helped found 60 years ago.
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