Dutch citizens go to the polling stations two weeks tomorrow: the campaign outcome is still fraught with uncertainty and voting intentions remain highly fragmented.

Today’s parliamentary seat projection from Kantar Public (TNS-NIPO) shows the governing VVD conservatives and right-wing populist PVV neck-and-neck in the high twenties. The sharp recovery in VVD support appears to show that Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s hardening of rhetoric on integration and immigration is bearing political fruit.

 

 

Whether Geert Wilders’ latest shock-value pronouncements will have alienated some of his adherents remains open to question. His PVV party is unchanged since the previous week’s Kantar survey, but well below his highs of December and January, when the PVV was forecast to take up to 36 of the 150 lower house seats.

Looking at the latest surveys from the six Dutch polling organisations, the VVD now leads with three, and the PVV with three. However with the biggest ‘virtual’ seat gap being just four, this contest is very tight.

Among other parties social liberals D66 and the Christian Democrat CDA are both maintaining their February uplifts with Kantar, while GroenLinks hits its lowest score of the month with any pollster. Also on the slide is the 50Plus party, which promotes pensioner issues. It has lost ground not only with Kantar but also in today’s daily LISS panel survey and in Maurice de Hond’s weekly Sunday poll (26 February), scoring just 6 seats in each case.

 

KANTAR PUBLIC
Seat projections for Tweede Kamer (change on 20 Feb poll in brackets):

Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV, Freedom Party) 28 (nc)
Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie (VVD, Centre right) 27 (+2)
Democraten 66 (D66, Social liberals) 19 (nc)
Christen-Democratisch Appel (CDA, Christian Democrats) 17 (-1)
GroenLinks (GL, Green Left) 13 (-3)
Socialistische Partij (SP, Socialist Party) 13 (+2)
Partij van der Arbeid (PvdA, Labour Party) 12 (+1)
50Plus (Pensioners’ party) 6 (-9)
ChristenUnie (CU, Christian Union) 6 (nc)
Others (SGP, PvdD, DENK, VNL, FvD) 9 (+2)

Fieldwork: 22.02-26.02.2017. Release date: 28.02.2017. Respondents: 1719. Methodology: Online. Note: Due to the highly proportional nature of the Dutch electoral system, pollsters generally express results in terms of seat projections rather than in percentages.

 

Fountain at the Binnenhof, Den Haag, Netherlands. Photo: Andrew Cornwell. All rights reserved.

 

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