European far-right leaders including Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders will gather in Prague this weekend for a controversial conference likely to be met with protests from groups fearful that xenophobic populism is on the rise in the Czech Republic.

The meeting of the rightwing Europe of Nations and Freedom group in the European parliament is being hosted by the anti-Islam Freedom and Direct Democracy party (SPD), which emerged as a force in Czech politics after winning nearly 11% of the vote in a parliamentary election in October.



Opponents of the meeting have vowed to demonstrate outside the conference venue, Top Hotel in Chodov, seven miles from central Prague, in a show of defiance they say aims to prevent intolerance from taking root in a city defined by the peaceful 1989 Velvet Revolution that spelled the end for communism in what was then Czechoslovakia.



The SPD, led by a part-Japanese immigrant Tomio Okamura, attracted electoral support through its slogan “No to Islam, no to terrorism”, in an election won by the ANO party of Andrej Babiš, a billionaire businessman sworn in as prime minister earlier this month.

The growing importance of Okamura’s party was illustrated last week when the Czech president, Miloš Zeman, who is known for hardline anti-Islam rhetoric, addressed its annual conference in a thinly disguised plea for support in his campaign for re-election next month.



Tomio Okamura, the leader of the Freedom and Direct Democracy party. Photograph: Martin Divisek/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Both men have seized on growing anti-Islam sentiment at odds with the Czech Republic’s small and low-profile Muslim population, estimated at between 3,000 and 20,000 people, but fuelled by the refugee crisis and terrorist attacks in Europe.



Czech police, at the request of their Dutch counterparts, are providing a special security detail for Wilders, the leader of the Freedom party (PVV), who has received death threats in response to his fierce anti-Muslim statements.



Le Pen, the leader of France’s Front National, will join him at the conference along with Janice Atkinson, a former Ukip MEP who became an independent after being expelled from the party in 2015 following an expenses scandal, and Marcus Pretzell, a former MEP for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and the husband of its former co-leader Frauke Petry. Both Pretzell and Petry recently left AfD over policy disagreements to join the newly formed Blue Party. Pretzell has called for “armed force” to protect Germany’s borders from asylum seekers and embraced the anti-Islam Pegida movement.

Other speakers will include senior figures from Austria’s Freedom party and the Italian Northern League.

The gathering comes at a sensitive moment in Czech politics. Babiš, who vowed during the election campaign to prevent the relocation of asylum seekers to the Czech Republic, was in Brussels this week on his first foreign trip as prime minister, arguing against the EU migrant quota scheme.



His minority government has 78 of 200 seats in parliament and faces a fight for survival, needing to win a vote of confidence in the coming weeks. Okamura has said the SPD will not provide the support to win such a vote because Babiš does not back his policies.



Hosting a conference with foreign far-right leaders could give Okamura added clout in Czech domestic politics, according to Prof Lubomir Kopeček, a political analyst at Masaryk University in Brno.



“The SPD has no great ideas in a European context, but this conference could be of symbolic use to them in the Czech Republic because it allows them to say we have colleagues in western Europe we can cooperate with, and who have similar approaches,” he said.

“Okamura isn’t someone with a big vision for the transformation of Europe. He’s an entrepreneurial opportunist. For now, he says he’s xenophobic. But if Czech public opinion moves, so will Tomio Okamura. He’s much more pragmatic than, say, Wilders.”



• This article was amended on 15 December 2017. An earlier version said Marcus Pretzell was an MEP for AfD. He was formerly an MEP for AfD, but is now part of The Blue Party.

