Vatican newspaper: stakes high in Dutch election

March 16, 2017

In a front-page L’Osservatore Romano op-ed piece, Luca Possati argued that the stakes were high in the Dutch general election, which pitted the party of incumbent Prime Minister Mark Rutte against the party of Geert Wilders, who has spoken out against the “Islamization of the Netherlands.”

Possati’s piece was published in the March 16 edition, before the final results of the March 15 election were released. Though his party lost seats in the legislature, Rutte won the election.

Possati said that the Dutch vote, following the Brexit and US presidential votes, will influence the upcoming French and German elections. He asked whether Dutch voters would “prefer to rely on easy solutions—closure in confrontation with the immigrants, protectionism—or decide to continue to believe in a project, that of the [European] Union, which remains one of the major achievements reached after the Second World War.”

 

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Further information:

• Test per l’identità europea (L’Osservatore Romano, p. 1)
• Dutch election: Europe's far-right populists fail first test (CNN)