Anne Frank House to serve as polling station for Dutch vote
Amsterdam mayor says ‘extra attention will be paid to the security of this polling station given the situation in Israel and Palestinian Territories’
THE HAGUE, Netherlands — Amsterdam-based voters in the Dutch election on November 22 will be able to register their choice at an unusual location — the world-famous Anne Frank House, the city’s mayor said.
Femke Halsema said in a letter to the city council on Thursday that “extra attention will be paid to the security of this polling station given the situation in Israel and Palestinian Territories.”
The canal-side house, one of the city’s top attractions, will in theory be closed for visitors but may allow tourists in “if in practice, few people actually come to vote there,” the mayor said.
The Netherlands goes to the polls later this month for what promises to be a seismic political event, with new parties shaking up the status quo and current Prime Minister Mark Rutte stepping down after a record 13-year term.
Polls suggest the race is too close to call, with an upstart party created by the popular Pieter Omtzigt currently marginally in the lead, followed by mainstream centre-right and centre-left parties.
The museum preserves the canalside house where the Jewish Frank family hid from the Nazis and Anne wrote her famous diary, one of the most haunting accounts of the Holocaust that has sold some 30 million copies.
After two years of hiding, Anne Frank and her family were captured in a raid in 1944. The teenager and her sister died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.
The museum receives around one million visitors every year.