The Dutch centrist liberal party of Rob Jetten has won Wednesday’s neck-and-neck election race, according to vote analysis indicating it cannot be beaten by anti-Islam populist Geert Wilders.<\/p>\n
Jetten’s D66 currently has a narrow lead of 15,000 votes over Wilders’ Freedom Party, and Dutch news agency ANP says even though the vote count is not complete, Wilders can no longer win.<\/p>\n
Projections from almost 99% of the vote put both parties on 26 seats in the 150-seat parliament – but ANP says Jetten’s centrists could win a 27th seat.<\/p>\n
Victory will mean Jetten will be able to start work on forming a coalition.<\/p>\n
Wilders had led opinion polls going into Wednesday’s election, but Rob Jetten, 38, succeeded in winning in some of the main Dutch cities including Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht with a positive campaign using a catchphrase of “Yes, we can”. <\/p>\n
He has been careful not to declare victory until all votes are in, but ANP said based on figures from the postal voters he could now be declared the winner.<\/p>\n
Although his path to forming a coalition is not straightforward, he is tipped to become the youngest prime minister in modern Dutch history.<\/p>\n
Jetten said after the vote that never before had a party won a Dutch election with fewer than 30 seats. <\/p>\n
He will need the support of at least three other parties to gather the 76 seats needed to form a coalition. The most obvious candidates would be the conservative-liberal VVD, the left-wing Labour (PvdA)-GreenLeft alliance and the Christian Democrats, but it could take months if that is to happen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Dutch centrist liberal party of Rob Jetten has won Wednesday’s neck-and-neck election race, according to vote analysis…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":252318,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-252317","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=252317"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252317\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/252318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=252317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=252317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=252317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}