NO CITY in the Netherlands is so quintessentially Dutch as The Hague. The Binnenhof, the seat of government, is a quaint Gothic fortress straight out of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. A mile to the west stands the beaux-arts Peace Palace, headquarters of the World Court; to the north is the glass-walled finance ministry, a temple of Calvinist fiscal transparency. But walk—or, rather, bicycle—just a mile eastwards, and a less traditional Netherlands comes into view, one of Ghanaian barber shops and Turkish tea houses. Women wear headscarves; men in djellabas duck into a storefront mosque for evening prayers.

Across from the mosque is Amin’s Moroccan butcher’s shop, where on a recent afternoon, behind a refrigerated counter full of shawarma, Jamal, the owner’s 31-year-old son, was installing a computer. Jamal is just the sort of person who could bridge the gap between the country’s traditional identity and its new immigrant communities. He came to the Netherlands with his family at age two, earned a business degree from Erasmus University, and worked in data analysis for several mid-sized companies. But last year he gave up on the corporate world and went back to his father’s shop. In Dutch society “racial profiling is everywhere,” he says; at his last company, he watched in dismay as white colleagues invented reasons to reject ethnic job applicants.

Like most Dutch with immigrant backgrounds, Jamal has in the past voted for the centre-left Labour Party. But now he is considering switching to Denk (“Think”), a new party that pitches itself explicitly to Muslims and ethnic minorities. After a decade of relentless insults from the anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant politician Geert Wilders (currently leading in the polls), many of his targets feel that neither Labour nor any other mainstream party is sticking up for them. Denk will not win more than a few seats in next year’s general election, but it is posing a crucial question: at a time of rising xenophobia, can Europe’s minorities rely on the broad centre-left parties for which they usually vote? Should they start their own parties? Or would that only make polarisation worse?

Throughout Europe, Muslims and non-whites tend to vote for the centre-left. In Austria 68% of ethnic-minority voters picked the Social Democrats in the recent general election, against 32% of whites. One study in France found that 93% of Muslims voted for the Socialist, François Hollande, in the 2012 presidential election. But minorities often feel that centre-left parties take them for granted and offer little in return. The Muslims who turned out for Mr Hollande in 2012 stayed home during municipal elections in 2014. (Many blamed the Socialists’ legalisation of gay marriage.) In France and elsewhere, when centre-left parties try to look tough on immigration or terrorism, minorities feel betrayed.

That was how Denk got its start. In 2014 the Netherlands’ Labour deputy prime minister, Lodewijk Asscher, approved extra scrutiny of Turkish-Dutch civic groups to make sure they were not fomenting radical Islam. Soon after, Dutch media reported a poll claiming that 87% of young Turkish-Dutch sympathised with Islamic State. The poll was rubbish—a later study found interviewees had not understood the questions—but rather than dismiss the results, Mr Asscher called them “troubling”.

Many Turkish-Dutch Labour stalwarts were infuriated. Party leaders seemed to know nothing about their constituency. “Anyone could see that poll was a mess,” says Munire Manisa, a district council member in Amsterdam. Her solution was to meet Mr Asscher and, among other things, get him to commission the study which debunked the poll. But two ambitious Turkish-Dutch Labour MPs, Tunahan Kuzu and Selcuk Ozturk, seized the occasion to break with the party and form a new one.

Denk has now signed up candidates from the Netherlands’ other two big minority groups: Moroccan-Dutch and Afro-Caribbean. In April it enlisted Farid Azarkan, a former top civil servant who heads the country’s main Moroccan-Dutch civil-society group. Then in May it recruited Sylvana Simons, a Surinamese-born television host who has campaigned against the racially insensitive Dutch custom of Zwarte Piet, a black-faced figure who distributes cookies during the children’s holiday of St Nicholas’ Day. Ms Simons called for the “decolonisation” of education and language. Dutch traditionalists responded with floods of racist invective on Facebook, and Denk scored a publicity coup.

Denk charges that the condescension of parties like Labour towards Dutch minorities is leading to their growing alienation. “People don’t feel recognised, and they don’t feel safe,” says Mr Azarkan. A long-running study of Amsterdam municipal elections shows that from the mid-1990s until 2006, when Mr Wilders’s party appeared, Turkish-Dutch voter turnout was about 50%. By the 2014 elections it had fallen to 34%. Among Moroccan-Dutch voters it fell from 37% in 2006 to just 24% in 2014. “They don’t feel represented by the Labour Party,” says Floris Vermeulen of the University of Amsterdam, who co-heads the study, “but they have nowhere else to go.”

Ethnic politicians need enemies, too

The danger, however, is that Denk’s approach of representing only ethnic minorities will widen the divisions in Dutch society. “(The Denk MPs’) speech is drenched with ‘us-against-them’ rhetoric,” says Ahmed Marcouch, a Moroccan-Dutch Labour MP. When the Dutch parliament recently considered a resolution to recognise the Armenian genocide, Denk took the unusual step of forcing individual voting, so that they could use video of Turkish-Dutch MPs from other parties voting for the motion as campaign material with their constituents.

This sort of divisive politics seems inevitable if parties are ethnically defined. And that is perhaps why Jamal, in the end, will hesitate to vote for Denk. “The question is, does Denk think of itself as a party that’s only for the immigrants?” he asks. “A political party is supposed to bring people together.”