Dutch nationalist Geert Wilders led a small protest outside Turkey’s embassy on Wednesday, denouncing its president as a dictator, as he tried to arrest his party’s slide in opinion polls with one week to go before a parliamentary election.

Turkish politicians have announced plans to address rallies in Germany and the Netherlands to drum up support among expat Turks for President Tayyip Erdogan, stirring disquiet in both countries and offering a campaign opportunity for Wilders.

He led a few dozen activists from his anti-Islam Freedom Party who unfurled a banner protesting the Turkish foreign minister’s plans to campaign for Dutch-Turkish dual nationals to vote in an upcoming referendum to expand Erdogan’s powers.

“Leave us alone, lobby in your own country, and stay away,” Wilders said of Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu’s plan to hold a rally in Rotterdam. “Mr Erdogan is a mere dictator,” he said. “We would not allow lobbying for North Korea or Saudi Arabia in our country either,” he added, calling for the entire Turkish cabinet to be declared “persona non grata”.

Wilders’ opposition right-wing Freedom Party, which wants to shutter mosques, ban the Quran, quit the European Union and stop Muslim immigration, led opinion polls for most of last year but is now losing ground to the conservative Christian Democrats (CDA) and the far-left Socialists. It is running second behind the pro-business liberals of Prime Minister Mark Rutte, which along with the CDA has toughened some of its rhetoric on immigration and Islam in the hope of capturing support from Wilders.

On Tuesday, Wilders targeted Socialist leader Emile Roemer in an online campaign advert, after the latter said in a newspaper interview that “fear of Islam is talked into you”. The advert responded by listing acts that Islam supposedly punished with death, including apostasy and homosexuality.

There was no reaction from within the embassy to the protest, during which bedraggled demonstrators unfurled a banner reading “Stay away. This is our country”. Cavusoglu, who arrived in Germany on his planned campaign tour on Tuesday, has been declared persona non grata in two German cities.

Published in Dawn, March 9th, 2017