GEERT WILDERS, the Dutch Eurosceptic politician, is known for tossing bombs, not disarming them. The programme of his Party for Freedom includes banning the Koran and withdrawing from the European Union. In recent weeks, thousands of Dutch have filed discrimination complaints against him over his calls for “fewer Moroccans” in the country. In short, Mr Wilders is probably the last Dutch politician one would expect to see playing the role of international mediator. Yet that is the role he volunteered for on May 14th, when he suggested that he could help calm the worsening feud between two fellow Eurosceptics: Nigel Farage, the leader of Britain’s United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), and France’s Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Front. “It’s not very helpful that they call each other names,” Mr Wilders told a group of foreign correspondents at a lunch in The Hague. “If it could be helpful that after the elections I could help to bring them together, and I could play a positive role there, I would be certainly willing to do so.” Like Mr Wilders’s Party for Freedom, Mr Farage’s UKIP and Ms Le Pen’s National Front are expected to finish first or second in their respective countries in this month’s elections for the European Parliament, riding a wave of popular dissatisfaction with the EU. But in recent weeks Mr Farage and Ms Le Pen have engaged in an escalating war of words. Mr Farage denounced lingering prejudice and anti-Semitism within the National Front. Ms Le Pen shot back in an interview in the Financial Times calling Mr Farage “dishonest” and saying he was demonising her party in the same way David Cameron, the British prime minister, demonised UKIP.

The spat grew out of Mr Wilders’s effort, launched last year, to form an alliance between Europe’s rising Eurosceptic parties. Italy’s Lega Nord quickly signed on, as did Ms Le Pen, though this entailed some discomfort on both sides. In the past, the strongly pro-Israel Mr Wilders had contrasted his party's position with the National Front’s anti-Semitic heritage. He now says he is satisfied Ms Le Pen does not share the prejudices of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the party’s former leader. Ms Le Pen, meanwhile, campaigned against the French move to legalise same-sex marriage last year; Mr Wilders, like most Dutch conservatives, strongly supports gay rights. The two leaders bridged their differences on that front by resolving that their alliance would strictly limit itself to campaigning to reduce the EU’s power, and leaving national issues aside.

Mr Wilders has assiduously courted Mr Farage in an effort to get him to join the alliance too. But the UKIP leader has refused, citing both the National Front’s anti-Semitic inclinations and the Party for Freedom’s hostility to Islam. “We are not an anti-Muslim party,” Mr Farage said in February, noting the inconsistency between Mr Wilders’s support for free speech and his calls to ban the Koran. Mr Farage has instead joined forces with a small French Eurosceptic party, Debout la République (Arise the Republic). Mr Wilders thinks Mr Farage may yet decide to cooperate with him and with Ms Le Pen after the elections are over. That would help them achieve their goal of forming a new Eurosceptic voting group in the European Parliament, whose rules require each group to have parties from at least seven countries. But Mr Farage has yet to give any hint he is interested. Perhaps this is not surprising. Nobody ever said that forming an international alliance of parties whose common characteristic is their opposition to an international alliance would be easy.