The PVV’s Geert Wilders has in the past called for the Netherlands to leave the EU as Britain did, but his party’s manifesto makes no mention of a so-called Nexit and instead urges voters to back the PVV so it can change the EU from within.
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00:00Final exit polls in the Netherlands suggest Geert Wilders' far-right PVV party has made big gains and is neck-and-neck with the centre-left alliance in the EU elections.
00:13The Ipsos poll has the green-left Labour alliance on course to win eight seats, with Wilders' Party for Freedom expected to pick up seven.
00:23Wilders was jubilant in a post on X describing his PVV party as the biggest winner.
00:31Wilders wants to take some power away from Brussels and back to national parliaments.
00:37But like many hard-right parties across the EU, he's also aiming for more power in the European Parliament to influence EU institutions from within.
00:47If you want to change the asylum policy, you also have the influence of the European Union with all the guidelines that we are bound on.
00:55And if you want to change that, you also need to have a strong presence in the European Parliament.
01:00And make sure that, if necessary, we will be able to change the European guidelines in order to be in charge of our own immigration policy and asylum policy.
01:11But at polling stations in the Netherlands, there were mixed feelings about Wilders and the PVV's right-wing politics.
01:18These elections, or the last elections, showed that people are fed up with the system at the moment.
01:26So things must be changed, but I don't think the vision of Mr Wilders is the right vision.
01:33The PVV sent shockwaves around Europe six months ago by becoming the biggest party in the Dutch National Parliament.
01:41Since the last EU elections in 2019, populist, far-right and extremist parties now lead governments in three EU nations,
01:49are part of governing coalitions in several others, and appear to have surging public support across the continent.
01:58Meanwhile, a pro-Kremlin hacker group claimed responsibility for what appeared to be a coordinated attack on the websites of three Dutch political parties.
02:07The PVV, the Christian Democratic Alliance and the Forum for Democracy all claimed their websites were targeted by cyber-attacks on Thursday.
02:16The Netherlands is electing 31 of the 720 members of the European Parliament to five-year terms.
02:28For more UN videos visit www.un.org