KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:
A far-right politician is leading the polls in the Netherlands, which holds a general election in March. Geert Wilders promises to ban Muslim immigrants. A new Dutch political party founded by immigrants plans to fight his agenda. Lauren Frayer reports from Amsterdam.
LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: Sylvana Simons got her start at the Dutch version of MTV. She went on to anchor the evening news and did "Dancing With The Stars."
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "DANCING WITH THE STARS")
UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER: (Speaking Dutch).
FRAYER: Simons is black. And she's spoken out against the Dutch Christmas tradition of Black Pete, in which Santa's helper's often played by a white person in blackface. That prompted someone to make a spoof music video about her.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "OH, SYLVANA")
ROB VAN DAAL: (Singing) Oh, Sylvana. Oh, Sylvana.
FRAYER: Oh, Sylvana, why don't you pack your bags and leave this country? - the video says. Then someone Photoshopped pictures of her face onto old photos of lynching victims from the American South. Simons filed a police complaint, quit her media job and went into politics, as she told reporters in a rare interview in early December.
SYLVANA SIMONS: I have made this conscious decision to enter politics because I feel that we are not just fighting racist people one by one. What we need is a change of the system.
FRAYER: At first, Simons joined a new Dutch political party called Denk - or Think. Its candidates include a Muslim woman who wears a headscarf, people of Turkish and Moroccan descent and black people like Simons. All of them say they felt left out of Dutch politics, especially now that the far-right, anti-Muslim leader Geert Wilders is surging in the polls. Sociologist Sandew Hira says that while Wilders seeks votes by stirring up fear of immigrants, Denk seeks votes from the victims whom Holland has failed to truly integrate.
SANDEW HIRA: People of color are not recognized as proper Dutch. And there is where the anger is from people who are seen as second-class citizens, while they were born here. And that is a generation of Denk.
FRAYER: Denk wants to establish a national racism register to track hate speech, build a slavery museum in the Netherlands and ban Black Pete. The party was founded two years ago by two Turkish Dutchmen who had dropped out of the Labor Party.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Speaking in Dutch).
FRAYER: I ran into some Denk voters on the sidelines of a youth soccer game. One of the dads, Bulent Ozturk, points out his son on the blue team.
BULENT OZTURK: If you look, the orange team are only Dutch and the blue team foreign - Turkish and Moroccan kids, mainly.
FRAYER: You're talking about your son, who is the third generation.
OZTURK: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
FRAYER: But you still call him a foreigner.
OZTURK: We are foreigners, yeah.
FRAYER: Ozturk still doesn't feel like he belongs in Dutch society nearly 50 years after his parents came to work here in the 1960s.
OZTURK: They came to do jobs that Dutch people wouldn't like to do or that they couldn't find people to do. So they were very welcome. But I don't feel at home here anymore.
FRAYER: So he says he plans to vote for Denk in the election this March. But the party has had some problems. Simons recently split with Denk. The party almost always refuses media interviews and puts out YouTube videos instead. Critics say those are similar tactics to the far right, putting the focus on identity politics and victimhood. Alexander Pechtold is parliamentary leader of the left-wing D66 party.
ALEXANDER PECHTOLD: It's almost the extremist opposite of what Wilders is doing. It's not inclusive. It's not looking for coalitions who want to really solve problems. No.
FRAYER: Denk has also been accused of being a mouthpiece of Turkey because two of its founders are Dutch Turks. But that accusation itself reveals how some Dutch see immigrants as loyal to another country. About a million of Holland's 17 million citizens are immigrants, their children or their grandchildren, a potentially powerful group of voters at the polls this March. For NPR News, I'm Lauren Frayer in Amsterdam.