Dutch voters have handed pro-European parties a sweeping victory in parliamentary elections, shunning the radical fringes.
Exit polls broadcast as soon as voting ended gave caretaker Prime Minister Mark Rutte's Liberals 41 seats in the 150-member lower house, a slender one-seat lead over the Labour Party.
Final results were expected early tomorrow.
The hard-left Socialists, who oppose austerity and eurozone bailouts, finished a distant third and gained no ground.
The far-right anti-immigration Freedom Party of Geert Wilders, who campaigned to leave the euro and the European Union, slumped and was set to lose about a third of its seats.
The two radical parties had dominated early stages of the campaign.
There were fears of a massive protest vote that might paralyse government and make Dutch support for further eurozone bailouts impossible.
The result removed a potential obstacle to efforts to stabilise Europe's single currency on the day when Germany's constitutional court gave the green light for the eurozone's permanent bailout fund to go ahead.
If confirmed, the outcome makes it more likely that Mr Rutte, with the strongest international profile, will remain premier.
The campaign ended up as a two-horse race between Mr Rutte, a former Unilever human resources manager dubbed the "Teflon" prime minister because of his ability to brush off disasters, and energetic new Labour leader Diederik Samsom, a former Greenpeace activist whose debating flair impressed voters.
The caretaker prime minister, whose minority centre-right government was toppled by Mr Wilders in April out of hostility to spending cuts to cut the budget deficit, vowed earlier to pursue his tough policy on eurozone bailouts in alliance with fellow northern creditor countries Germany and Finland.
Mr Samsom laid claim to a place in government and called for national unity.
The Liberals and Labour have played down talk of forming a coalition together.
But parliamentary arithmetic suggests that is the most probable outcome given the highly fragmented political landscape.
