Britain ‘could liberate Europe again’ by voting for Brexit and sparking populist revolution

Britain could “liberate Europe” for a second time in a century by voting for Brexit on June 23, triggering a “patriotic spring” across the continent and an outpouring of populist discontent against Brussels, Geert Wilders, the right-wing Dutch populist, has claimed.

In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Mr Wilders – a fiercely nationalist, anti-Islamic politician whose Party for Freedom is currently topping the polls in the Netherlands – said that the populist  “genie was now out of the bottle”, and could never be put back in.

“Like in the 1940’s, once again Britain could help liberate Europe from another totalitarian monster, this time called ‘Brussels’. Again, we could be saved by the British,” he said in his heavily fortified office in The Hague where an oil painting Winston Churchill and a Telegraph front page of Margaret Thatcher hang on the walls.

If people see that a country can leave, and the lights do not go out, there is not a war, and a country does not go bankrupt, but even flourishes. If Britain proves that this theory can become a reality, it would have an enormous effect.”

Predicting that a Netherlands referendum on EU membership would swiftly follow a Brexit, he added that David Cameron was running a “stupid” campaign by attempting to scare the British into staying in Europe.

“I hope that a lot of people like Mr Cameron will continue saying the most stupid things. It helps a lot,” he said, “People are not stupid any more. They know they are being frightened by fear-mongers.”

For years Mr Wilders has been widely reviled as an extremist and a demagogue, however with anti-immigration and anti-austerity sentiment rising from Athens to Amsterdam, he now believes Europe is showing itself ready to embrace many of his populist ideas.

Not so long ago, Mr Wilders acknowledges, such dreams of a populist revolution would have remained just that – dreams – but as in America, where Donald Trump has caught the establishment flat-footed with his brash appeal to discontented grassroots, Europe’s populists are suddenly ascendant.

“This is an exciting time,” he says, “The genie is out of the bottle, and the genie will never go back in the bottle. Things are changing, and changing very fast. A democratic non-violent revolution is on the radar – a ‘patriotic spring’ is coming.”