AMSTERDAM _ Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte's Liberals easily beat the anti-Islam Freedom Party of Geert Wilders in Wednesday's election, an exit poll showed, as voters responded to Rutte's plea to send a signal on halting the spread of populism.
The Liberal Party is projected to take 31 seats in the 150-seat lower house of parliament compared with 19 seats for the Freedom Party, according to the official exit poll conducted for national broadcasters released after voting closed at 9 p.m. in Amsterdam. Wilders' party has to share second place with the Christian Democrats and centrist D66, both of which are also projected to get 19 seats.
The outcome, if confirmed, would be a worse result than opinion polls had predicted for Wilders, and represent a rejection of his platform of pulling the Netherlands out of the European Union, abandoning the euro, closing Dutch borders and stopping all immigration to the Netherlands by Muslims. It would also suggest that the nationalist sentiment that promoted the U.K.'s Brexit vote and brought Donald Trump to the White House is struggling to secure as big a foothold in mainland Europe.
With crucial elections in France in April and May and then in Germany in September, Wednesday's election in one of the EU's founding members was in the international spotlight like rarely before. Faced with the prospect of a major shift in the direction of their country, Dutch voters responded by flocking to polling stations. Turnout in Rotterdam, the second-biggest city, was forecast to be the highest in at least 30 years, while balloting stations in The Hague and elsewhere were kept open later to allow the queues of people to vote.
