Prime minister Mark Rutte and PVV leader Geert Wilders finally met in a long-awaited head to head television debate on Monday evening in front of students and staff at Erasmus University in Rotterdam.

During the debate, which lasted little over half an hour, Wilders called on Rutte to expel Turkey’s ambassador, saying anything less would be an insult to the Netherlands.

Wilders repeatedly called Rutte untrustworthy during the debate, while Rutte accused Wilders of ‘sitting on the sofa using Twitter’. Rutte reiterated his earlier statements that the VVD will never work together with the PVV in government.

Wilders, who appeared to be wearing a bullet-proof vest during the debate, has made very few public appearances during the election campaign and has avoided all but this debate.

This meeting had been seen as his big opportunity to put Rutte in his place. But although the debate yielded few surprises, it did allow Rutte to profile himself as the ‘big anti-populist’, the Volkskrant said in its analysis.

Roderik van Grieken, of the Dutch debating institute, said he believed Rutte had put in the better performance. Particularly during the section of the debate on immigration was Rutte able to hit back at Wilders by asking him what the PVV’s plans actually entail.