School Me On The Dutch PM Election ( Archived) (6)

Up to 13 million Dutch voters are going the polls today as Eurosceptic firebrand Geert Wilders takes on the current Prime Minister Mark Rutte.

Mr Wilders, the populist leader of the anti-Islamist Party for Freedom (PVV), had lost his clear lead in the polls as went into the knife-edge Dutch election.

The latest polls show that Prime Minister Mr Rutte, from the Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), is now on track to win a few more seats than Mr Wilders.

But no political party will come even close to winning enough seats to form a majority government in the 150-member lower house of the Dutch Parliament.

When is the Dutch election?

After a long hard-fought election campaign, the people of the Netherlands are finally going to the polls today (Wednesday March 15).

The polling stations opened at 7.30am local time (6.30am GMT) and will close at 9pm local time (8pm GMT).

When are the exit polls?

After the polls close at 9pm local time (8pm GMT), the count begins and the exit polls will be broadcast soon after.

The exit polls tends to be fairly accurate and their prediction for the 2012 election was only a total of six seats off out of 150 seats.

When will the first results come in?

It is thought that the first results, from the smallest Dutch towns, could come in as soon as 40 minutes after the polls close.

The tiny Dutch nature island of Schiermonnikoog was the first to declare its results on the last Dutch election night in 2012.

Pepijn Bergsen, the Netherlands Analyst at Economist Intelligence Unit, said the first results from the municipalities will start to trickle in. The small ones will come in first.”

Mr Bergsen said first results from the smallest municipalities will “start to trickle in” early on as election night gets under way.

But he said that results from the big cities will not come in until ‘deep into the night’, perhaps sometime between midnight and 3am GMT.

The provisional final result is expected in the early hours of Thursday.

It seems that Wilders is second in the polls.