CONTRARY to popular belief, the most interesting figure in Dutch ethnic relations is not the Islam-bashing politician Geert Wilders. Rather, it is a 34-year-old rapper, comedian and reality-television host named Ali Bouali, better known by his stage name Ali B. In the mid-2000s, after Mr B had a string of hip-hop hits, talk shows began inviting him to represent Moroccan-Dutch youth. He turned out to be not only funny but an absolute sweetheart. He took part in education programmes on climate change; he recorded with the country’s most successful white pop artist; he performed confessional one-man shows. During Queen’s Day celebrations in 2005, he gave the Netherlands’ Queen Beatrix an impromptu hug.

Eight years later, at the inauguration of Beatrix’s son Willem-Alexander, Mr B delivered the central musical performance directly to the new king and queen. By that time his deep eyes and comically intense stare had come to stand for the hopeful side of the Dutch integration story. He is sometimes dismissively referred to as a knuffelmarokkaan, or “huggy-Moroccan”: the Dutch idiom implies that he is both a token and the squeeze-toy version of a dangerous animal. But Mr B also uses the term lightheartedly about himself, drawing the sting.

Mr B’s best work does not involve his own music at all. In 2011 he produced a reality-TV series in which he paired hip-hop artists with white performers from the classic era of Dutch kitsch pop in the 1960s and 1970s. The result was a fusion of two musical cultures, one white and mostly working-class, the other ethnically mixed. In the most often-cited episode, the rapper Kleine Viezerik (“Dirty Little Man”) collaborated with a former Eurovision contestant, Willeke Alberti. At the end of her performance he removed his sunglasses to show tears streaming down his face.

This cross-cultural appeal has made Mr B an icon in every Dutch demographic—including supporters of Mr Wilders’s Party for Freedom (PVV). He is the one prominent Moroccan-Dutch figure whom the PVV’s leaders never attack. But last year, when Mr Wilders called for “fewer Moroccans” in the Netherlands, Mr B felt compelled to ask his audiences whether they would like “less Wilders”. As Europe’s refugee crisis and the terrorist attacks in Paris increase hostility towards Muslims and immigrants, Mr B is finding it harder to stay above the fray.

In late October Mr B returned to Almere, the town where he spent his teenage years, to stage a preview of his latest one-man show, “Je suis Ali B”. Almere is a planned town 30km (20 miles) east of Amsterdam with rows of housing blocks and streets ludicrously named after cultural celebrities—Isadora Duncanweg, Lucille Ballstraat and so forth. The central pedestrian zone is a modernist playground of glass and concrete. A few hipsters fleeing Amsterdam’s high property prices have begun moving in. On a Thursday night the promenades are full of window-shoppers speaking everything from Turkish to Twi and Papiamento.

The ethnic mix largely stops at the doors of the municipal theatre. The crowd for “Je suis Ali B” is overwhelmingly white, with a large contingent of older women. Leonieke Bos, who recently retired after a career in Almere’s ethnically mixed school system, says Ali B is a role model for many of the kids she taught. “You never knew which of them were going to go the wrong way,” she remembers; the studious girl would suddenly turn up pregnant, the boy who dealt drugs would land a solid job.

Mr B must have surprised his share of teachers. He was raised by a single mother and, by his own account, spent his teen years dealing and smoking marijuana. He claims to have stolen worshippers’ shoes from the local mosque. His mother, despairing, packed him off to her family in Morocco for ten months. Mr B credits his grandmother with straightening him out. It sounds a little too comfortably like the familiar hip-hop tale of rising from the gutter. But the criminality Mr B describes among Moroccan youth is real. In 2013 just over 10% of ethnic Moroccans between 18 and 25 were suspects in a crime. That is the highest rate of any Dutch ethnic group—twice as high as those of Turkish descent and nearly five times as high as white Dutch.

Mr B plays on this background to dodge difficult political questions. To avoid taking a stand on the controversy over the racism of Zwarte Piet (a fictional black-faced Dutch character who helps St Nicholas deliver seasonal gifts), he jokes that as a Moroccan, the only thing he understands is the feeling of someone entering your house without your knowledge. But his room to finesse such issues is shrinking. In “Je suis Ali B” he describes encountering an angry fan: “If Wilders says something you never come out with a reaction; if there’s a debate about Zwarte Piet you’re nowhere to be found. You’re always hiding!”

Tears in the social fabric

Mr B is too smart to get sucked into such political arguments. His greatest strength lies elsewhere: in the power of kitsch. Over and over, the rapper has succeeded in getting white and non-white Dutch audiences to cry with each other. In May, a song he performed on a TV talk show about his relationship with his sons had the entire country weeping.

Across Europe, liberals have tried to respond to populist fear-mongering over immigration and Islam by deploying statistics and appealing to reason and abstract values. Mr B’s approach is more sophisticated: it recognises that reason is not enough. To break down prejudice and fear, you also need emotion. His empathetic moments have probably done more to promote Dutch acceptance of Muslims than any policy could have achieved.

This is not to say that the battle is being won. In “Je suis Ali B”, Mr B jokes that he and Mr Wilders have a symbiotic relationship: the more the PVV succeeds, the greater the demand for bridge-builders like himself. He must hope this is true. The PVV is polling at over 25%, its highest level ever.