Four groups of people are the most likely to win as the people of the Netherlands are choosing who will lead their country into a new time in politics.
The polls show that the race is very close, and people can vote until 9:00 PM (8:00 PM GMT).
Dilan Yesilgöz, a leader from the centre-right, is expected to win and become the first woman to be the prime minister of the Netherlands.
Her biggest competition are a politician named Geert Wilders who is against Islam, and a group led by a former important EU commissioner named Frans Timmermans.
More than 13 million people in the Netherlands can choose from 26 different parties to vote for on Wednesday. Up to 17 of these parties could win seats.
People in Europe are paying close attention to this election because Mark Rutte has been in charge for 13 years. The person who wins could have less than 20% of all the votes in the country and get fewer than 30 seats out of 150 in the parliament. This has never happened before in Dutch politics.
People don’t trust the government as much because of a scandal that wrongly called many parents welfare fraudsters. A politician started a new party in the middle of the political spectrum just three months ago, and now he is being seen as someone with a lot of influence.
Pieter Omtzigt’s New Social Contract will be very important in creating the next government. He doesn’t care much about leading the country, but the person who does win will need his help.
“I know what I can do for the people of the Netherlands,” said Dilan Yesilgöz. She came to the Netherlands as the daughter of Turkish refugees and wants to reduce the number of immigrants coming in, as well as lower the high cost of living.
If he becomes the winner, she will make sure her conservative-liberal VVD party stays away from a Wilders government.
On Tuesday night, during the final TV debate, when he said he would be a Prime Minister for all Dutch people, she insisted that he would need to change all his policies, like banning Islam and leaving the EU, called “Nexit”, for that to happen.
Mr Wilders, a Member of Parliament for 25 years, has said he will wait on his anti-Islam plans. He also mentioned that he knows Dutch voters are not ready to leave the EU.
“We don’t have plans for Nexit, but we will have a vote to decide about it, and that’s a separate matter,” he added.
Political scientist Martin Rosema thinks that the way he talks in this election is not too strong. He thinks that some political parties may be able to work with him if he becomes a part of the government.
The Freedom Party might agree to the coalition with or without ministers. Normally, the government is either mostly made up of one group or mostly made up of another. But in this situation, it could be somewhere in the middle.
Even though there are many options to choose from, a lot of voters don’t care and almost half of them still haven’t made up their minds. That number is seen in one of the poorest areas of Rotterdam, Crooswijk.
Laura said she hasn’t made a decision yet, but her choice will be one of the parties that wasn’t in the previous government. “They are all to blame for the higher prices. ”
Drago, who works at his girlfriend’s cafe, is upset because he says that the higher taxes are making life really hard. He says that migration has made the housing crisis in the Netherlands worse. There are not enough homes, with a shortage of 390,000.
Three girls at the laundry place said they might vote for the Labour-GreenLeft (PvdA/GL) team, but they are worried about immigration too.
Frans Timmermans, who leads the left-wing group, thinks he has a good chance of becoming the next leader of the government.
“This country always needs a group of people working together to run it, it’s been like this for a long time,” he told the BBC.
“The left can’t run the country alone, we always need partners in the middle of politics. ”
Last year, more than 220,000 people moved to the Netherlands, which was a big increase from the year before. This happened partly because refugees left Ukraine to escape from Russia’s invasion.
This is why Pieter Omtzigt’s centrist NSC wants to limit migration to 50,000 people. It’s also why Geert Wilders is getting more popular in the polls.
Thierry Baudet, who is a competitor from the far-right, did not do as well with the voters. He is not doing well in the polls and he got attacked twice while campaigning. He ended up in the hospital on Monday night because someone hit him over the head with a beer bottle.