VVD leader Dilan Yesilgoz and Freedom Party leader Geert Wilders at an election debate in Rotterdam on Monday. Photograph: Remko de Waal/AFP via Getty Images
Voters in the Netherlands return to the polls on Wednesday less than two years after Geert Wilders led his party to a shock election win that the anti-immigration agitator could well repeat – but this time with little chance of his party ending up in government.
Polls suggest that Wilders’s far-right Freedom Party (PVV) could again finish first in a vote triggered when he pulled it out of a fractious and ineffectual four-party right-wing coalition last June in a row over his 10-point plan for a radical crackdown on refugees.
But such was the anger sparked by the populist leader’s willingness to torpedo the government over demands widely judged either unworkable or illegal that all the main political formations have since ruled out joining him in a new coalition.
Under the Dutch system, every 0.67 per cent of the vote yields one MP.
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