Geert Wilders Party Makes Gains

The Christian Science Monitor reports on the unexpected gains by Geert Wilders's Freedom Party in the Netherlands:

The Dutch woke up Thursday morning to a striking new right-leaning political reality after Wednesday’s national elections ratified both a conservative emphasis on austerity and a populist push against immigration and Islam.

It was the first European elections since the Greek debt crisis put the euro in a funk – and results proved so fragmented that forming a ruling Dutch coalition will be difficult and may take months.

The budget-cutting center-right Liberals (conservatives in US parlance) under Mark Rutte gained the most seats, 31. But the center-left Labor Party took 30, led by former Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen, who ran on a “bridge-building, hate-busting” campaign.

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