Immigrant fears boost Dutch far right

Spectre of uncontrolled migrants is key selling point for politics of Geert Wilders

THE HAGUE, NETHERLANDS— That Duin- dorp has few immigrants is part of its charm for Willem van Vliet, whose Willem and Toet fish bar serves crispy shrimp croquettes and other Dutch snacks.

When the cook leaves the tidy, quiet neighbourhood next to The Hague’s port and travels the few kilometres to more culturally diverse areas of the city, he sees a Netherlands not enriched by immigration, but ravaged by it.

“Too many people have come to Holland with no education, no work experience, and they are coming here only for money from the government,” he said. “Enough is enough.”

Such views make Duindorp one of the epicentres of the populist wave sweeping Europe, gatecrashing its politics and clouding its future. Dutch elections on Wednesday, followed by polls later this year in France and Germany, will be a barometer of whether the storm is gaining strength.

The spectre of uncontrolled floods of migrants from countries that don’t share Europe’s Christian heritage is a principal selling point of the far-right firebrand politics of the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen in France. By harping on anti-Islam, anti-immigrant themes, they are accused of making xenophobic views mainstream again.

For their supporters, they simply tell it like it is.

Of the Netherlands’ 17 million people, just over one in five now have a foreign background and about 850,000 are Muslim. Paradoxically, hostility against migrants is sometimes sharpest in places that have not absorbed large numbers of them.

Duindorp has no mosques and few Muslims. Its several thousand people are overwhelmingly white, most born locally.

Leo Pronk, a Duindorp community leader, said Wilders hooks voters