Hans Schreurs, 66 and the owner of an old-fashioned snack bar in the Dutch town of Venlo, is doing well for himself. Business is booming, he owns his home, and he and his wife are locally famous for their deep-fried breaded eggs, known as friet-ei.
Still, Mr. Schreurs says he worries that his grandchildren are competing with immigrants for their own shot at prosperity. That he is why he plans to vote for Geert Wilders and his far-right Party for Freedom in Wednesday’s parliamentary election.
“This country is getting too full,” said Mr. Schreurs recently, speaking from behind the counter of his automat-style fry shop, Automatiek Piccadilly.
Mr. Wilders, a far-right firebrand with bold anti-immigrant rhetoric, has done much to keep migration in the public mind — often linking it, with or without evidence, to the Netherlands’ chronic housing shortage and to crime. He has recently pushed for a complete stop to asylum and the deployment of the army to guard national borders. And when he began his campaign in Venlo back in September, Mr. Wilders warned that the country was careening toward a “multicultural hell.”
This election, two years after Mr. Wilders’s party became the dominant force in Parliament, is a test of whether such strident messages will continue to hold sway with Dutch voters.
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