In the conference room of a slightly soulless hotel on the neat outskirts of the eastern Dutch town of Emmen, a crowd of 100 or so had gathered to hear a former MEP and European commission staffer tell them there is far too much Europe.

“Everyone wants more EU. We want less,” said Derk Jan Eppink. “Take power back from Brussels, return it to nation states. With our French, Italian, Polish, Spanish partners, we will be a united front.”

His audience, somewhat smaller than he had hoped (the local football team was playing that evening), loudly voiced their approval. But it is far from clear how united, or effective, the “less EU” front will be in the new European parliament.

Eppink’s young party, Forum voor Democratie (FvD), emerged from nowhere in March to win Dutch provincial elections and is on course to send five MEPs to Brussels – as many as the prime minister Mark Rutte’s liberal VVD party, with which it is neck and neck in the polls.

It will join the fractious ranks of the populist, nativist Eurosceptic right that, while it no longer favours leaving the EU, agrees on little besides its determination to roll back Brussels’ remit, and whose allegiances and alliances are in flux.

Not that any of that matters much to Eppink’s audience. They loved his insistence that Brussels must wind its meddling neck in, that Dutch taxpayers must not pay the price for southern EU spendthrifts, and that the climate crisis is just another excuse to rob European citizens of their hard-won liberties (and cash).

“The FvD is about freedom, people making their own choices,” Eppink said. “They say we can’t eat beef any more, showers must be short, diesel cars are devils on wheels.”

Unlike the crude, explicit Islamophobia of Geert Wilders’ Freedom party (PVV), whose voters it is poaching, FvD – led by Thierry Baudet, 36, a philosopher-dandy with a penchant for playing piano in his office, posing nude on social media and quoting Latin in parliament – says it is “rational, cultured and serious”.

A flamboyant, controversy-loving talkshow fixture with an extravagant vocabulary, Baudet is waging “the culture war of the US alt-right cloaked in the garb of European intellectual history”, says Thijs Kleinpaste, a political theorist.

The FvD argues more subtly than Wilders that borders should be closed “except to those we need”, that immigrants whose views “do not fit western civilisation” should be deported, and that a decades-long attempt by a liberal elite to “alienate the Dutch from their history and separate them from their culture” should be reversed.

Some supporters were drawn to the party because it has few taboos. “The FvD questions everything, it doesn’t just accept what the mainstream says,” said Jordi van der Klis, 25, a restaurant worker. “The FvD fights the disease of Dutch consensus.”

Marjan, 44, who did not want to give her second name, liked the FvD’s battle against “social justice warriors and political correctness”. Wim Kuijt, 70, who sells audio equipment, said he was happy to have “found my party. This is real. No games. I am so sick of being told what’s right, what I have to think, in this country.”

Sarah de Lange, of the University of Amsterdam, says Baudet’s aura of sophistication and “performance politics” – he has dressed up as a soldier to take part in a parliamentary defence debate – initially drew more highly educated Dutch to FvD, but now a majority of the party’s support comes from former Wilders voters.

“He’s deliberately pushing the boundaries of debate, deploying concepts that are clear dog whistles to the far right,” de Lange says. Baudet has called Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s illiberal, anti-immigration strongman, “a hero of the western world”, and he is equally admiring of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.

Eurosceptic parties – of the conservative right, far right and far left – are expected to win up to 35% of seats in the 751-seat parliament this week. With the centre-right EPP bloc and the centre-left S&D group on course to lose their joint majority for the first time, coalitions will be more difficult to form.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest From left, Geert Wilders, leader of Dutch party for Freedom, Matteo Salvini, Jörg Meuthen, leader of Alternative für Deutschland, and Marine Le Pen at a rally in Milan. Photograph: Luca Bruno/AP

Parties such as FvD that oppose further EU integration and seek a return to a “Europe of nations” will also hold key policymaking positions such as committee chairs, which could lead to a more nation-first approach in areas such as immigration.

But the “less EU” camp is also divided by yawning ideological and policy differences, and likely to be hampered by the loosely defined – and potentially unstable – parliamentary groups it will form.

National parties strongly disagree on quotas for allocating migrants to EU member states (which Italy’s Matteo Salvini wants but others, especially in the east, reject); on economic policy (France’s Marine Le Pen is protectionist, FvD anything but); on foreign policy (many are pro-Putin, many decidedly not); and on the lessons of Brexit after the chaos of Britain’s attempt to leave.

Almost alone among the EU’s rightwing populists, FvD, which until recently was calling unambiguously for Nexit, or a Dutch exit from the EU, still favours a referendum on membership (even though the Dutch government abolished advisory referendums last year). Of at least 15 parties demanding EU plebiscites in 2016, barely any are still doing so – and one that is, Germany’s AfD, has lost support.

Moreover, none of the three Eurosceptic groups currently in parliament look likely survive the elections unscathed. FvD hopes to join the conservative ECR, which includes Britain’s Conservatives and Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party.

That group, however, will be weakened by the loss of the far-right Danish People’s party and the Finns party to Salvini’s new nativist alliance, which held its first rally in Milan on Saturday and is expected to swallow the hardline ENF group of Le Pen’s National Rally and Austria’s scandal-hit Freedom party.

The third group, EFDD, home to AfD and Britain’s Brexit party, also looks unlikely to survive. No one knows where the Hungarian MEPs from Orbán’s Fidesz, suspended from the centre-right EPP, will end up.

“Given these multiple divisions, the cohesiveness of Eurosceptic parties as a collective force should not be overestimated,” the Open Europe thinktank concluded in a recent report. Baudet and Eppink’s dreams of a united front to roll back the EU may not become reality as readily as they hope.