Dutch voters appeared Thursday to have narrowly voted against new laws giving security services greater powers to snoop on emails and online data, amid growing global fears about internet privacy. With some 93.8 percent of votes counted from Wednesday's referendum, the results were still on a knife-edge.
The country was split, with 48.7 percent of voters opposing the legislation and 47.3 percent in favour, the NOS public broadcaster said. Some 4.0 percent of the ballots were blank. One of the last remaining counts still awaited was from the capital, Amsterdam. Official results are not due until March 29.
The referendum, triggered by a group of Amsterdam students as a citizens initiative, was held alongside municipal elections across 380 Dutch local councils. Although it is non-binding, Prime Minister Mark Rutte, who supports the legislation, has vowed he will take the results of the referendum seriously.
"It's very exciting," Rutte said on the margins of an EU summit in Brussels. "But it does seem to be going towards a 'no' vote." If the final results show voters have rejected the law, then "it is our duty to look at it again," Rutte vowed, quoted by the Dutch news agency ANP.
Results from the municipal elections were fractured, with local parties doing well. The biggest winner of the night was the eco-friendly leftist party GroenLinks, which emerged as the largest in several major cities, including Amsterdam, Utrecht, Arnhem and Eindhoven.
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