Dutch politician Geert Wilders has issued one of his strongest warnings yet about the demographic transformation of Europe, arguing that mass immigration rather than climate change represents the more fundamental long-term challenge to European civilisation.

Writing for Breitbart, Wilders argues that anyone travelling through Western Europe can see changes that official political debate often fails to confront. He points to the increased visibility of Islamic dress and immigrant communities across cities from Norway to Italy and France and contends that these are outward signs of a much larger demographic development. His central argument is straightforward: weather changes, governments change and economic crises pass, but large-scale demographic changes can alter a society permanently.

Wilders goes considerably further than simply arguing for lower immigration. He believes Europe is undergoing a process of Islamisation that ultimately threatens its historically Christian and, more broadly, European cultural identity. He links this transformation to concerns about antisemitism, women's safety, the treatment of homosexuals, freedom to criticise Islam and the increasing electoral importance of immigrant communities.

The Netherlands provides an interesting example. Statistics Netherlands reported in March 2026 that only 42 per cent of Dutch people aged 15 and older now identified with a religion or other religious worldview. Sixteen per cent identified as Roman Catholic, 12 per cent as Protestant and 6 per cent as Muslim. The most striking feature of modern Dutch religious demography is therefore not that Islam has overtaken Christianity nationally, but the enormous decline of Christianity and growth of the religiously unaffiliated.

This qualification matters when assessing Wilders's assertion that Islam is becoming dominant among younger Dutch people. His broader demographic concern cannot simply be dismissed, because Muslim communities are generally younger than the traditional Christian population and immigration continues to change the country's composition.

Wilders also makes a series of striking claims about sexual offending among men from particular migrant backgrounds. He gives relative figures ranging from 4.4 times the Dutch rate for Syrian men to 20.3 times for Somali men. Those figures have circulated previously and appear to derive from figures expressed as recorded suspects per 10,000 men: approximately 2.8 for Dutch men, compared with 12 for Syrians, 19 for Iranians, 21 for Eritreans, 24 for Iraqis, 31 for Afghans and 57 for Somalis. However, I have not located a sufficiently clear current primary Statistics Netherlands source establishing Wilders's precise comparison, so it is likely the official data is suppressed or unavailable.

Wilders is on even firmer factual ground when he turns to Spain. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez's government conducted an extraordinary migrant regularisation program during 2026. By the closing date of 30 June, the Spanish government had received 1,174,978 applications. Of these applicants, 59.4 per cent were under 34, while two-thirds came from Central and South America, 22.9 per cent from Africa and 8.3 per cent from Asia.

The Spanish government presents this policy very differently from Wilders. Sánchez argues that regularisation facilitates integration, brings workers into the formal economy and provides the legal certainty necessary for migrants already living in Spain. His government is also developing additional legal migration pathways intended to meet labour-market requirements. As a Leftist would say.

Wilders sees precisely the opposite lesson. For him, granting legal status on such a scale confirms that European governments remain committed to demographic policies that their electorates may ultimately be unable to reverse; it is the Great White Replacement.

The disagreement is therefore not principally about whether large-scale demographic change is occurring. It concerns whether that transformation should be welcomed, managed, reduced or stopped.

Perhaps the most remarkable part of Wilders's argument is that his concern about European demographic and cultural continuity is no longer confined to European nationalist parties.

The Trump administration's 2025 National Security Strategy uses language that would have been extraordinary in an official American strategic document only a few years earlier. It states that Europe's economic difficulties are overshadowed by the prospect of what it calls "civilisational erasure." It identifies migration policies, falling birth rates, loss of national identity and declining civilisational self-confidence among the causes.

The document goes on to warn that if current trends continue Europe could become "unrecognizable in 20 years or less." It also explicitly states that the United States wants Europe to remain European.

Whatever one thinks of that language, Wilders therefore isn't inventing the American government's position. His article closely reflects an argument that has now entered official US strategic thinking.

Where Wilders goes further is in identifying Islam specifically as the principal threat. He describes Islam not merely as another religion within a pluralistic society but as a political and ideological system fundamentally incompatible with European civilisation. He consequently calls for closed borders, deportation of illegal migrants and removal of foreign criminals.

He places this argument within a sweeping historical narrative, invoking Poitiers in 732, the completion of the Reconquista at Granada in 1492, Lepanto in 1571 and the defeat of the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683. Wilders believes contemporary Europe is confronting another stage of the same centuries-long civilisational struggle.

European societies have exceptionally low fertility rates. Large-scale immigration can therefore change population composition considerably more rapidly than it would in societies maintaining replacement-level fertility. At the same time, Europe's historically dominant Christian denominations have undergone an extraordinary decline. In the Netherlands, for example, a majority of the population no longer identifies with any religion.

Consequently, Europe's future identity will not necessarily be determined simply by a contest between Christianity and Islam. Secularisation, immigration, differential fertility, assimilation, intermarriage and the cultural behaviour of second- and third-generation immigrants will all affect what Europe looks like later this century.

This is where Wilders's warning deserves to be considered. His prediction of an Islamic Europe is a political and demographic hypothesis, not an established statistical fact. But neither is it irrational to ask what decades of high immigration combined with extremely low native fertility and declining attachment to traditional institutions will eventually produce.

Europe has every right to ask that question. Indeed, democratic societies ought to be able to discuss population policy more openly than almost any other issue because demographic decisions operate over generations. A government can reverse a tax increase next year. It can abandon an energy policy after an election. Population changes are much harder to reverse.

That is ultimately the strongest part of Wilders's argument. Whether one accepts his language of Islamisation and civilisational danger or rejects it entirely, the demographic transformation of Europe is not imaginary. Spain really has just received almost 1.175 million applications through an extraordinary migrant regularisation process. The Netherlands really has experienced the collapse of its traditional Christian religious structure. And the United States really has placed concern about European migration, birth rates and national identity into its National Security Strategy.

Wilders believes these developments amount to an existential threat. The Left, useful idiots for the globalist elite, believe they represent the emergence of a new multicultural Europe.

Geert Wilders MP is leader of the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV) and Vice-President of the Dutch Parliament.

https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2026/08/14/exclusive-geert-wilders-writes-we-should-be-worried-about-demographic-change-not-climate-change/