DHAKA: Voters are going to the polls in the Netherlands in the first of three crucial eurozone elections this year.

The race is dominated by Prime Minister Mark Rutte's centre-right party and that of Geert Wilders, running on an anti-immigration platform, reports the BBC.

Rutte has said the election is an opportunity for voters to “beat the wrong sort of populism”.

Wilders has pledged to take the Netherlands out of the EU, close all mosques and ban the Koran.

His Freedom Party had been leading in opinion polls but they have since suggested his support may be slipping.

France goes to the polls next month to elect a new president while Germany is due to hold a general election in September.

Wednesday's election also comes amid a diplomatic spat between the Netherlands and Turkey.

The row with Turkey followed Rutte's decision to ban two Turkish ministers from addressing rallies in the country. In response, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused the Netherlands of being “Nazi remnants”.

“Whatever the outcome of the elections today, the genie will not go back into the bottle and this patriotic revolution - whether today or tomorrow - will take place,” Wilders declared after casting his vote.

While a populist surge is still possible in the Dutch ballot, a host of other parties could also do well, leaving Dutch politics fragmented, the BBC's Damian Grammaticas reports from The Hague.

After casting his vote, Rutte asked his fellow citizens to imagine how the world would react if the Freedom Party came first.

“I think the rest of the world will then see that after Brexit, after the American elections, again the wrong sort of populism has won the day,” he said.

Earlier, in televised debates, Rutte and Wilders clashed over how to stem immigration.
Rutte dismissed Wilders's plan to close borders and mosques and to ban the Koran as “fake solutions”.

Wilders accused Rutte of providing better healthcare for immigrants than for the Dutch themselves.

Lodewijk Asscher of the Labour Party, the junior party in Rutte's coalition, called Wilders a man of “10,000 angry tweets and no solutions”.

Seven of the 28 parties running could win more than 10 seats in the 150-seat parliament, the polls suggest.

With the sixth largest economy in the EU, the Netherlands is at the heart of the eurozone and EU decision-making.

BDST: 1830 HRS, MAR 15, 2017
AP