SINT WILLEBRORD, The Netherlands (news agencies) — “Everyone is welcome,” reads the sign at the church door in this quiet Dutch village, where neighbors greet each other from tidy porches overlooking manicured lawns.
But that declaration of tolerance seems oddly out of place.
Triggered by economic and cultural anxieties that have whipped up fears about immigrants, people here and throughout the Netherlands have veered far to the right politically. It’s an extreme example of a trend being felt across the continent that could tilt the outcome of this year’s European Union parliamentary election.
In Sint Willebrord, which has few immigrants among its 9,300 residents, almost three out of four voters chose a virulently anti-migrant, anti-Muslim party in an election last year that shattered the Netherlands’ image as a welcoming, moderate country.
The Party for Freedom, led by a peroxide-haired firebrand named Geert Wilders, received nearly a quarter of all the votes — in a country where less than 5 percent of the people are Muslim — with slogans such as “no Islamic schools, Qurans or mosques” and “no open borders and mass immigration we cannot afford.”
Voters across Europe are increasingly empowering leaders like Wilders who promise to restrict immigration and, in some cases, constrain democratic freedoms: of religion, of expression, of the right to protest.
These forces have bubbled up to varying degrees one country at a time, including in Germany, France, Spain, Sweden and Austria. But before long, experts worry, they could dramatically reshape the continent from the top down.
In June, voters in the 27 member states of the European Union will elect their next Parliament for a five-year term. Analysts say that far-right parties, now the sixth-largest group in the assembly, are primed to gain seats – and more influence over EU policies affecting everything from civil rights to gender issues to immigration.
“People have a score to settle with ‘old politics,’” said Rem Korteweg, senior research fellow at the Clingendael think tank in The Hague.
In the Netherlands, long a haven on things like drug use, end-of-life decisions and gender issues, this score-settling paved the way for the shrill voice of Wilders. “A vote for Wilders clearly was a protest vote,” said Korteweg.
In some other European nations, the shift to the right has gone even further and begun to gnaw at the foundations of democracy.
In Hungary and Serbia, recent elections were free but not fair, democracy experts say, because the ruling parties captured the media, the courts and the electoral authorities. The EU has withheld funds from Hungary and Poland as punishment for backsliding on basic rules of law.
And in the Netherlands and beyond, politicians like Wilders have built their support on promises not to treat all as equal before the law. That often translates to: keep foreigners out.
“The clear trend toward anti-migration policies is there,” said Korteweg. “And in some nations, it has already allowed the radical right to gain power.”
Support for Wilders’ Party for Freedom more than doubled since the last Dutch election in 2021. With 23% of the vote, Wilders stands a good chance of leading any future governing coalition.
Nowhere was there more support for Wilders than in Rucphen, a town in the south of the Netherlands to which the village of Sint Willebrord belongs and where, for the first time, more than half of voters chose Wilders’ party. In 2012, his party received 27 percent of the town’s vote.
For a quarter century, voters across the Netherlands have grown increasingly disgruntled as successive governments — despite high levels of taxation — were unable to stop the erosion of cradle-to-grave benefits citizens had come to expect for things like education, health care and pensions.
“It is as if people are being forced to vote for Wilders,” said Walter de Jong, 80. A lifelong baker, De Jong said he was forced to close his business last year because of rising costs and stringent government rules.
“Everything is going backward. Every year, it gets worse,” said De Jong. He previously supported the free market party of the outgoing prime minister, Mark Rutte, but chose not to vote in the latest election.
The decline in Dutch living standards has coincided with rising immigration. Most have come from Ukraine and other former Soviet states; a smaller number have come from countries such as Syria and Turkey. Two decades ago, the Netherlands had a net outflow of migrants, but by 2022 that had swung to an influx of 224,000 in a nation of 17.5 million.
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