The political party of Dutch politician Geert Wilders, which is leading polls ahead of parliamentary elections in March next year, has promised in its manifesto to close mosques and “ban the Koran.”
“All mosques and Islamic schools closed, a ban on the Koran,” the document outlining the electoral program of the Freedom Party (PVV) said.
The document was posted on Wilders’ Twitter feed on Thursday.
The PVV says it will reverse the “Islamization” of the country with a range of measures, including closing the borders, shutting asylum seeker centers, banning migrants from Islamic countries and stopping Muslim women from wearing headscarfs in public.
On the back of Europe’s migrant crisis, opinion polls have for months given Wilders’ PVV the edge over the coalition parties of the Labor Party and the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy led by Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte.
Late last year, polls predicted soaring support for the PVV, saying that the party could gain as many as 38 seats in the 150-seat parliament.
However, that number has slipped back.
A poll from Ipsos this month gave it 28 seats — still way up on the 12 it currently has.
The immigrant crisis has polarized the Netherlands, a nation of 17 million people, leading to heated debate.
Wilders, who is to go on trial in October on charges of inciting racial hatred, also said he would do all he could to hold a referendum on the Netherlands leaving the EU, despite an unsuccessful first attempt in June following Britain’s vote to end its membership of the EU.
His party has also pledged to put an end to foreign aid and to increase funding for police and security.
PARLIAMENT CHAOS: Police forcibly removed Brazilian Deputy Glauber Braga after he called the legislation part of a ‘coup offensive’ and occupied the speaker’s chair Brazil’s lower house of Congress early yesterday approved a bill that could slash former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s prison sentence for plotting a coup, after efforts by a lawmaker to disrupt the proceedings sparked chaos in parliament. Bolsonaro has been serving a 27-year term since last month after his conviction for a scheme to stop Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from taking office after the 2022 election. Lawmakers had been discussing a bill that would significantly reduce sentences for several crimes, including attempting a coup d’etat — opening up the prospect that Bolsonaro, 70, could have his sentence cut to
China yesterday held a low-key memorial ceremony for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan. Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last month said that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital. A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll
‘UNWAVERING ALLIANCE’: The US Department of State said that China’s actions during military drills with Russia were not conducive to regional peace and stability The US on Tuesday criticized China over alleged radar deployments against Japanese military aircraft during a training exercise last week, while Tokyo and Seoul yesterday scrambled jets after Chinese and Russian military aircraft conducted joint patrols near the two countries. The incidents came after Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi triggered a dispute with Beijing last month with her remarks on how Tokyo might react to a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan. “China’s actions are not conducive to regional peace and stability,” a US Department of State spokesperson said late on Tuesday, referring to the radar incident. “The US-Japan alliance is stronger and more
FALLEN: The nine soldiers who were killed while carrying out combat and engineering tasks in Russia were given the title of Hero of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea North Korean leader Kim Jong-un attended a welcoming ceremony for an army engineering unit that had returned home after carrying out duties in Russia, North Korean state media KCNA reported on Saturday. In a speech carried by KCNA, Kim praised officers and soldiers of the 528th Regiment of Engineers of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) for “heroic” conduct and “mass heroism” in fulfilling orders issued by the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea during a 120-day overseas deployment. Video footage released by North Korea showed uniformed soldiers disembarking from an aircraft, Kim hugging a soldier seated in a wheelchair, and soldiers and officials
RSS