Tag Archive for: Polls in the Netherlands

Poll: 43% of the Dutch want fewer Moroccans

The virulent attacks on Geert Wilders, leader of the Freedom Party (PVV) by opposition parties in the ruling coalition in The Netherlands and threats to have him prosecuted for his “fewer Muslim” comments in our April NER article “Geert Wilders Once Again Endures a Firestorm of Criticism” have backfired.   A new poll commissioned by the PVV reveal that Dutch voters reject those threats categorically.

A news release by the PVV today noted “43% of the Dutch want fewer Moroccans”:

At the request of the PVV, the independent research bureau “Peil.nl / Maurice de Hond” conducted an opinion poll into the view of the Dutch regarding the presence of Moroccans in the Netherlands.

No less than 43% of all the Dutch prefer to have fewer MoroccansOnly 3% wants more Moroccans, while 48% does not care how many Moroccans there are in the Netherlands. A majority of the voters of PVV (95%) and of the governing VVD (59%), but also more than one third of the voters of the Socialist SP and more than a quarter of the Labor voters prefer to have fewer Moroccans in the Netherlands.

A majority of 55% of all Dutch is opposed to a criminal prosecution of PVV-leader Geert Wilders.

Geert Wilders: “The figures are very clear. Millions of Dutch agree with me. It is great, too, that a majority of the Dutch is of the opinion that I should not be prosecuted.”

This latest poll bolsters a previous one of Dutch parties in the European Parliamentary elections just one month away on May 22 to the 25th that showed the PVV in the lead.  See our March 17th Iconoclast post, “Wilder’s Freedom Party Leads Poll for Dutch European Parliament Elections”.    We noted:

Geert Wilders” Freedom Party (PVV) leads in Dutch polls next month’s European Parliament elections.  According to a report in the Dutch publication,  Spitsnieuws:

A TNS NIPO poll published today predicts that the PVV, the Party for Freedom of Geert Wilders, will become the biggest party in the European elections in the Netherlands.

According to the poll the PVV is going to win the European elections on 22 May with 18.1% of the votes, followed by the Liberal VVD of Prime Minister Mark Rutte with 16.2% and the liberal-democrat D66 party with 15.7%.

The losers of the European elections would be the Christian-Democrats and Labor.

At the conclusion of our April NER article we said:

We hope that those Dutch folks who went to the polls on March 19th and gave the PVV victories in several smaller municipalities may be joined by others in the majority, who didn’t vote. That might provide the PVV with a victory in the May EU parliamentary elections. We have seen Wilders bounce back from previous episodes like a proverbial cat with nine lives.

Both polls taken in the Netherlands clearly indicate that the groundlings aren’t buying the ‘extremist’ charges and calls for prosecution of Wilders. Instead they may be auguries of a possible significant victory for the Freedom Party candidates in the May 2014 European Parliamentary elections.

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EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on The New English Review.