Cybersecurity
Dutch Vote in Test of Populism's Potency at Heart of Europe
- Premier Mark Rutte vying with Geert Wilders to place first
- Election will probably lead to prolonged coalition talks
Here's Why the Dutch Elections Matter
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Dutch voters are heading to the polls in a general election that will provide the first gauge of the spread of populism into the core of Europe.
The contest pits Liberal Prime Minister Mark Rutte against his anti-Islam challenger, Geert Wilders, who led for much of the campaign on a platform of pulling the Netherlands out of the European Union and halting immigration. But polls in the past two weeks suggested that Wilders’s attempt to ride the wave of nationalist sentiment that prompted the U.K.’s Brexit vote and catapulted Donald Trump to the White House may have lost momentum.