Immigration and EU: Buzzwords in 3 key elections

Dutch legislative elections on Wednesday set the stage for votes in France and Germany that also took place against a background of euroskeptic or anti-immigrant sentiments boosted by Brexit.
The Dutch election, which has been overshadowed by the diplomatic crisis between The Netherlands and Turkey, could see the anti-euro, anti-Islam Party of Freedom (PVV) score its best result since its creation in 2006, according to survey polls. The election has boiled down to a tight race between the far-right party of MP Geert Wilders and Prime Minister Mark Rutte and his People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD).
France
France’s presidential race has turned into a rollercoaster, with front-running candidates dogged by scandal and the anti-immigrant, anti-euro National Front (FN) seeking to pull off a Donald Trump-style upset. The first round of voting takes place on April 23. If no candidate gets more than 50 percent of the vote, the top two go into a runoff on May 7.
Once the frontrunner, conservative Francois Fillon has had to battle to stay in the race because of the revelations that he had paid his wife Penelope hundreds of thousands of euros from public funds, allegedly for fake jobs. Just six weeks from voting, Fillon was charged Tuesday with several offenses over the scandal.
This has proved good news for Emmanuel Macron, an independent centrist, who polls show would reach the second round of the election, where his opponent is forecast to be far-right leader Marine Le Pen.
Although polls show Le Pen losing in the second round, after Trump’s victory in the US and Britain’s vote to leave the EU, analysts caution against bold predictions. However, Le Pen has her own legal troubles: She faces prosecution for distributing images of Daesh atrocities over Twitter as well as separate cases over misusing public funds at the European Parliament and campaign financing.
Germany
Immigration is a widely-discussed issue in German elections to be held on Sept. 24, but the two leading parties favor strong links within the EU.
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative coalition, which comprises her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Bavarian CSU party, is, according to polls, in a dead heat or even slightly behind the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), which has named popular former European Parliament president Martin Schulz as its candidate. The anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party appears to have lost some steam after polling at 12-15 percent following a militant attack that killed 12 people in a in December.
Recent surveys have given it 11 percent, boosting its hopes of becoming the first hard-right party to enter Germany’s Parliament since 1945.
The AfD, close to France’s FN and the Dutch PVV, rails against Merkel’s liberal asylum policy that has drawn more than a million asylum seekers to Germany since 2015.
The AfD started out as an anti-euro party before seizing on public anger over Merkel’s decision to open the country’s doors to migrants and refugees.

Source: Arab News