Geert Wilders, the outspoken bleach-blond leader of the anti-immigration Dutch Freedom Party is back as one of leading anti-EU populists running in this month’s European Parliament elections.

Populist Wilders has bounced back after legal setbacks and some of his American backers, after squirming, say they will stick by him. In a recent speech in The Hague, Wilders – who has attracted supporters as far afield as the US and Australia – asked the crowd if they wanted more or fewer Moroccans.

“Fewer! Fewer!” they chanted.

“Good. We’ll arrange that,” he said, smiling.

About 18 per cent of voters tell pollsters they will cast their ballots for his party in the EU-wide elections on May 22, ahead of the governing coalition Liberal and Labour parties and level with the centrist D66 party.

Wilders’s populism is a magnet for floating voters and he has set the tone of an increasingly harsh debate about immigration.

Wilders is identifying an obvious problem in many countries across Europe

“If you held a referendum in the Netherlands tomorrow and asked the question that I asked – ‘do you want more or less Moroccans?’ – I think 70 or 80 per cent would say yes (less) for sure,” he said last month. Wilders has lived under round-the-clock armed guard since he received death threats in 2004. He views himself as a crusader against extreme Islam. “At least when I face threats, it’s the result of what I say,” he said with pride. And Wilders, who fought off charges of hate speech after his 2008 film “Fitna” denounced the Koran for allegedly inciting violence, says he has no regrets.

A US backer, Pamela Geller, said Wilders was protesting at Islamic supremacists. “Mr Wilders is identifying an obvious problem in Holland and in many countries across the continent of Europe.”

Though he casts himself as an outsider, Wilders is one of the Netherlands’ longest-serving politicians. He first took up a parliamentary seat in 1998.

Son of a Dutch father and an Indonesian mother, he entered politics to challenge what he saw as political correctness, drawing on the following of anti-immigration politician Pim Fortuyn, who was assassinated 12 years ago.

His party wants to deport immigrants convicted of violence even if they have Dutch citizenship, stop immigration from Muslim countries, and take the Netherlands out of the European Union.