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Geert Wilders, the far-right winner of Dutch parliamentary elections, has said he will compromise on his hardline manifesto in order to convince other parties to back him as prime minister.
The anti-Islam firebrand has toned down his pledges to ban the Koran and mosques in the Netherlands and said he would “continue to moderate” his policies as his party envoy was due to resume coalition talks on Monday.
“Today, tomorrow or the day after . . . I will become prime minister of this beautiful country,” Wilders wrote on the social media platform X on Saturday.
His Freedom party won the most seats in the election but needs at least two coalition partners to form a majority in the lower house of parliament. The far-right party is forecast to secure 37 seats in the 150-strong assembly, with final results expected next week.
The right-leaning liberal People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) of outgoing prime minister Mark Rutte, which finished third, has ruled out joining his cabinet, though it said it could back a “centre-right” government from outside.
Wilders’ next potential partner is the centre-right New Social Contract party, which has 20 seats and has become the fourth-largest force after being founded in August. The NSC shares much of Wilders’ critique against the political elite that has governed the Netherlands in Rutte’s 13 years in power.
But NSC leader Pieter Omtzigt, a former Christian-Democrat MP, has said he could not govern with Wilders unless he dropped unconstitutional policies such as the Koran and mosque ban.
The two also differ on EU policy. In his manifesto, Wilders promised a referendum on the Netherlands’ continued membership, while Omtzigt has ruled out a “Nexit”.
The NSC on Monday is set to meet Wilders’ “scout”, Freedom party senator Gom van Strien, who has been appointed to lead exploratory coalition talks.
Wilders railed against mainstream politicians who “thought they could marginalise the Freedom party politically” in his post. He said thwarting his ambition to become premier would betray democracy and said they had opened a “political bag of tricks”.
“If we are not given the opportunity to translate the voice and democratic mandate of millions of people into executive responsibility, we will only become bigger and bigger. Because the genie is out of the bottle and won’t go back in,” Wilders wrote.
He claimed his victory was not just fuelled by discontent with record net migration, which topped 220,000 last year in a country of 18mn. Problems included “too many asylum seekers, too few homes, insufficient purchasing power and poor healthcare”, he wrote.
Omtzigt has also campaigned on these issues, pledging to limit immigration to 50,000 a year.
If the NSC refuses to go into a coalition with Wilders, it could join a Labour/Green-led cabinet with Frans Timmermans as premier.
Denk, a migrants rights party expected to secure three seats, said it opposed a Wilders-led government and did not believe he had changed his views. “We cannot hand over our country to someone who wants to deprive more than 1mn Muslims of their rights,” said Denk leader Stephan van Baarle.
So far only a smaller anti-establishment party, the Farmer-Citizen Movement, which won a projected seven seats, has said it is open to joining a coalition with the Freedom party.
Coalition talks in the Netherlands usually take several months and lasted 299 days after the 2021 election.
Elizabeth Kuiper, associate director of the European Policy Centre think-tank, said a Freedom party led government would reduce support for Ukraine and have a big impact on the new European Commission that takes office in a year.
“Clearly the mobilisation of voters expressing political discontent needs to be addressed at the EU level in the years to come,” Kuiper wrote in a blog. “The EU would need to show its ability to solve social problems and implement a fair and just climate transition.”