http://www2.canada.com/edmontonjournal/news/story.html?id=0ff5f2a4-47d5-43a4-906e-c5c6e2171236

An anxious Europe has tilted further to the right after Dutch election results released Thursday indicated a stronger-than-expected showing for anti-immigrant politician Geert Wilders.

His Freedom party came third with 24 seats, up from nine, in the 150-seat parliament.

Mark Rutte's Liberals, promising a severe austerity program to tame a swollen deficit, finished first by the slightest of margins, getting 31 seats, compared to the Labor party's 30 seats.

The Christian Democratic party tumbled to fourth place, winning 21 seats, compared to 41 in the 2006 election.

That forced the resignation of party leader and former prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende, whose government fell earlier this year after he failed to get support to keep combat troops in Afghanistan.

"What we have been witnessing for quite some time is a weakening of established centrist and moderate parties" in Europe, Joerg Forbrig, an analyst with the German Marshall Fund think-tank, said in an e-mail interview.

Populist and extremist parties of the right and even the left, in Germany's case, have responded better than established parties to "growing anxieties in our societies, about the economic crisis, globalization and social justice on the one hand, and about cultural diversity, migration and minorities on the other," he wrote.

"Unless the political establishment starts taking seriously those worries among many European citizens and provide adequate policy responses, this trend toward the political fringes will continue and grow."

COALITION COULD TAKE MONTHS

There are expectations that it could take months to form a coalition government, with one option being a coalition involving the Liberals, Christian Democrats and the Freedom party.

"I think everyone is afraid, afraid that the (Freedom party) will end up in government," Zeynep, 46, a Muslim woman who refused to give her last name, told Agence France-Presse Thursday.

She was wearing a veil which would, if Wilders had his way, be subjected to what he calls a "head rag tax."

Wilders, 46, called Wednesday's vote a "glorious day for the Netherlands" and urged other parties to give him a role in the new government.

"More safety, less crime, less immigration and less Islam is what the Netherlands has chosen," said Wilders, who wants to ban the Qu'ran, shut down immigration from Muslim countries and forbid construction of new mosques.

"I don't think other parties can ignore us."

Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front, which made modest gains in French regional elections in March after being trounced in the 2007 presidential election, crowed over the latest gain by a far-right party in Europe.

Vice-president Bruno Gollnisch cited the success of Hungary's anti-Semitic and anti-Roma Jobbik party, which won 47 seats in the April election, and Austrian far-right presidential candidate Barbara Rosenkranz's showing in April, when she won just under 16 per cent of the vote.

"These results testify to a growth of resistance in Europe to the destruction of national identities," he said in a statement.