Wilders Party Slumps in Shock Dutch Poll on Eve of Election
Source: Bloomberg
The prospect that Geert Wilders might emerge as the winner of Wednesday’s Dutch election was thrown into doubt by a poll on the eve of voting that showed his Freedom Party slumping to fifth place.
The final poll from I&O Research showed Wilders’s party on 16 seats in the 150-member lower house of parliament. That was four seats less than in the previous I&O poll released Monday and compared with a high of 33 seats for the Freedom Party in December. Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s Liberals rose three seats from the previous poll to 27 seats in Tuesday’s survey. The centrist D66 party, the Greens and the Christian Democrats were all ahead of the anti-Islam, anti-European Union Freedom Party.
While the I&O survey could be an outlier, the bulk of the polling was conducted after a diplomatic dispute erupted over the weekend between the Netherlands and Turkey which Rutte was deemed to have handled well. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused the Dutch government of Nazi-like behavior after Rutte refused to let Turkish ministers address a pro-government rally in Rotterdam. Rutte sought to de-escalate the spat, while Wilders said he should have taken tougher action against Turkish diplomats.
“There is support among voters of all parties for the performance of Mark Rutte” in the crisis, I&O said in a commentary to the 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.
Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-03-14/wilders-party-slumps-in-shock-dutch-poll-on-eve-of-election
= new reply since forum marked as read
IMO. 
crossed! 
.
That's right. The man who has railed against immigrants, his own mother was born in Indonesia. Geert's blond hair is the result of hair-dye. Doing his school days, his dark, curly, hair resulted in ridicule. No doubt, his mix ethnicity has made him target Muslims. Like so many of these bigoted types, they are often running from themselves.