AMSTERDAM, March 7, 2006 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - The Netherlands went to the polls on Tuesday, March 7, for local elections that are expected to show a shift towards the left and away from anti-immigration populists and ruling center-right parties blamed for an economic slump.

"There are two main issues in this election. A lot of people say they don't agree with this government... the other important issue is integration and immigration," retired academic Willem van der Kloot told Reuters at an Amsterdam polling location.

Polls suggest voters will use the local elections to express their discontent with the Christian Democrat-led coalition government after a period of economic stagnation, high unemployment and anti-immigrants stance.

Voters are to elect municipal councils but not mayors, who are appointed by the queen for a six-year term.

Early turnout figures showed that at 1100 GMT some 10 percent of 11.8 million eligible voters had cast their ballots, which is comparable to the last local polls four years ago when total turnout was 58 percent.

Polling stations will close at 9:00 pm (2000 GMT). As the votes will be cast by computer in almost all municipalities the results will be known soon after polls close.

Support is seen increasing for the opposition Labour Party (PvdA) and Socialist Party (SP) and slipping for Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende's CDA and their ruling partners, the liberal VVD and centrist D66, according to opinion polls.

A recent poll by the TNS Nipo institute showed that the PvdA will practically double their 2002 score in the municipal elections from 16 percent to 31 percent.

The ruling CDA party is predicted to fall from 21 percent in 2002 to 12 percent while its liberal VVD ally will see its tally slide from 16 percent to 10 percent.

While opinion pollsters caution against extrapolating too much from the local level for the national vote in 14 months, the election looks set to boost the hopes of Labour leader Wouter Bos of taking over from Balkenende in the 2007 general elections.

The biggest shift is expected in the port city of Rotterdam, where the party of murdered anti-immigration maverick Pim Fortuyn has ruled since the last local election in March 2002.

Voters there are expected to shift back to Labour from Fortuyn's Liveable Rotterdam party, which has introduced tough policies to clamp down on crime, but has alienated many in the city's large Muslim minority.

Other offshoots of the Fortuyn movement elsewhere in the Netherlands are also expected to lose ground.

Dutch imams have appealed to the country's 1 million Muslims to vote in the local elections.

In a sign of their growing influence, Marco Pastors, the leader of Liveable Rotterdam, apologised last week for anti-Muslim comments.

Fortuyn was killed by an animal rights activist just days before a general election in May 2002, when his party soared to second place, winning a place in government with the CDA.

But voters abandoned Fortuyn's party in a new general election in 2003 after its internal squabbles brought down the center-right government after just 87 days in office.

Inter-ethnic tensions, famously predicted by Fortuyn's populists, reached boiling point in November 2004 following the slaying of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Dutch Muslim for the insulting documentary Submission on alleged mistreatment of women under Islam.

The Netherlands' two major cities have taken very different approaches to the problems.

Amsterdam, run by the PvdA, has tried to stay open and encourage the dialogue between the communities while Fortuyn's populists in Rotterdam have advocated a crackdown on Muslims.