More Trouble on the Way as Extreme Right Wing Politicians on the Rise in Europe

Alison Smale

KOBLENZ, Germany — Marine Le Pen wasted no time in proclaiming 2017 as the year of far-right awakening in Europe.

“We are living through the end of one world, and the birth of another,” Ms. Le Pen, the leader of France’s National Front party, told a cheering gathering of members of European right-wing parties on Saturday in this Rhine River city to chart a joint path to success in elections in the Netherlands, France and Germany this year.

“In 2016, the Anglo-Saxon world woke up,” Ms. Le Pen said. “In 2017, I am sure that it will be the year of the Continental peoples rising up.”

The triumph of anti-Europeans in Britain and Donald J. Trump in the United States has galvanized the Continent’s far-right parties, who are making appeals to disillusioned voters already bitter over social inequality, loss of sovereignty and waves of migration. And, amid suspicions that Russia is trying to destabilize the Continent by allying with the right, Europe’s mainstream parties may be forced into awkward, or ineffectual coalitions, to preserve their power and keep extremists out.

Geert Wilders, a Dutch nationalist whose anti-Islam Dutch Freedom Party currently leads the polls for spring elections in the Netherlands, was emblematic of the confidence of the far-right at the meeting.

“The world is changing,” he said. “America is changing. Europe is changing.” He added: “It started last year with Brexit, yesterday there was Trump and today the freedom-loving parties gathered in Koblenz making a stand.”

“The genie will not go back into the bottle again, whether you like it or not,” he said.

Mr. Wilders and other far-right leaders have successfully tapped in to a sense of lost identity across Europe that has been heightened by the arrival of waves of migrants, the effects of a globalized and digitized economy and perceptions that attempts are being made by institutions like the European Union to impose uniformity on diverse European cultures.

Patrick Bauer, 22, a member of Alternative for Germany, a far-right party that has benefited from widespread opposition to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to allow in some one million mostly Muslim migrants in 2015, said he was drawn to the meeting mostly by Mr. Wilders.

The Dutchman epitomizes the choice and variety that should be available in Europe, without citizens being forced to accept policies and economic models fashioned by pan-European institutions, said Mr. Bauer, who sits on a local council in the Taunus hills north of Frankfurt.

He described himself as a Christian strongly opposed to abortion and worried by what he sees as the advance of Islam — “up to 80 percent of students at some schools in Frankfurt,” he said.

The German chancellor’s name was loudly booed and chants of “Merkel must go!” erupted several times during the two-hour morning rally, attended by hundreds of supporters.