“GO VOTE (and send us a pic from the voting booth),” reads the front page of the Dutch daily Metro inviting young voters to go to the polls as the country elects a new parliament Wednesday.
As the colorful front page shows, Dutch voters will be using red pencils to tick boxes on old-fashioned paper ballots, a security measure the New York Times calls “a stark response to warnings that outside actors, including Russia, might try to tamper with pivotal elections.”
Current PM Mark Rutte’s center-right party and Geert Wilders’s far-right Party for Freedom lead the race in this general election, the first of three key votes in the eurozone this year. Upcoming contests in France and Germany are also taking shape against a backdrop of rising populism.
In the Netherlands, today’s parliamentary elections come amid heightened diplomatic tensions with Turkey. The impasse follows a move by Turkish government officials to campaign in several Dutch cities (to Turkish expatriate voters) for a referendum in Turkey next month that could give more power to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
