ARTHUR MAX
TOBY STERLING
Associated Press Writers
AMSTERDAM – Dutch politicians scrambled Thursday to sort out who will form the country’s next government, after polarized voters fled centrist parties for those on both the right and left over divisive issues like budget cuts and Muslim immigration.
After a neck-in-neck race between the left-leaning Labor party and the pro-business VVD Party, the VVD claimed “apparent” victory Thursday and plans to take the lead in what may be weeks or even months of negotiations over building a new governing coalition.
“It appears as if for the first time in our history the VVD has become the largest party in the Netherlands,” party leader and would-be prime minister Mark Rutte told chanting supporters in the seaside town of Scheveningen.
With 99.5 percent of votes counted, the VVD led Labor 31 seats to 30 in the 150-seat parliament.
Under the Dutch constitution, advisers will now visit Queen Beatrix later Thursday to discuss the results. Party leaders will do the same on Friday to inform her of their coalition preferences before she names someone to oversee preliminary negotiations.
Voters also gave a major boost to the anti-Islam Freedom Party of Geert Wilders, which scored its best-ever finish with 24 seats, up from nine. However the Freedom Party siphoned most of its gains from another party on the right: Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende’s Christian Democrats suffered a humiliating defeat, dropping from 41 to 21 seats.
Balkenende, who has led the government for eight years, said he is leaving politics. He will remain the caretaker premier until a new cabinet is installed.
Labor Party leader Job Cohen, the former mayor of Amsterdam who was the other main candidate to become prime minister, congratulated Rutte with his win “conditionally.”
The most likely outcome appears to be a centrist coalition with VVD and Labor combining with two smaller parties on the left, the Green-Left and Democrats-66, who both won 10 seats.
Yet neither the top two parties will be able to form a government without major compromises on ideology.
The VVD has pledged to slash the deficit by cutting government spending and welfare programs while Labor has criticized the program as harmful to the poor.
Labor wants to preserve government social programs, raise taxes on the wealthy and make it easier for immigrants to integrate rather than punishing those that fail.
Although not as outspoken against immigration as Wilders, Rutte has also argued that immigrants who cannot contribute to the Dutch economy should not be allowed to come, and he would ban them from receiving welfare for 10 years after arrival.
In theory, Wilders and his Freedom Party could join the VVD and others in a right-wing Cabinet – but Wilders’ polarizing stances have made him unsavory to other parties. He is also under hate speech prosecution for comparing Islam to Nazism and calling for a ban on the Quran.
In addition, his economic platform is more similar to the Socialists than the free-market VVD.
Wilders said he was willing to compromise in order to enter the Cabinet.
Other parties may try “to shove us aside, but we must be taken seriously,” Wilders said.
Altogether, 10 parties will be represented in parliament. Official results won’t be released until June 15, when all oversee votes have been counted.