When former British foreign secretary Boris Johnson spoke out against Denmark’s burqa ban earlier this month, he made it clear he still wasn’t a fan of the veils; the women who wear the “oppressive” garments look like “letter boxes“ or “bank robbers,” he wrote in his Telegraph column, and businesses should be allowed to “enforce a dress code” on their own. Critics denounced the “Islamophobic” comments from the pages of rival publications. Veiled women also reported a spike in racist abuse on the streets after the remarks.

There’s no proposal pending to ban face veils in the United Kingdom. But there is speculation that Johnson, who has his eyes on the conservative party leadership, decided to woo his party’s base by dissing women who wear the veil in Trump-style plain-speak, while citing enough John Stuart Mill to give him some cover for the intolerant remarks. In Denmark—where only around 150 women wear the full face veil but the anti-migrant Danish People’s Party has gotten increasingly popular with voters—the center-right government’s motive for banning the niqab and burqa as of August 1 was not so different.

Earlier this year, the Open Society Foundation published a study that found that 22 out of 28 European Union states are currently debating some kind of legislation regarding Muslim women’s clothing. Mainstream political parties introduced most existing bans after 9/11 amid rising Islamophobia. But the current rash of burqa-ban proposals have largely been championed by far-right parties, whose numbers have swelled due to rising immigration from Turkey, North Africa and the Middle East, especially during the migrant crisis in 2015. Now, more moderate parties are increasingly incorporating elements of far-right platforms into their own agendas.

Facing a hot-headed far-right opponent in 2017, for example, Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz drafted an integration packet that included banning full face veils. As in Denmark, very few women are estimated to wear the Islamic veil in Austria. But it is precisely because so few women wear the burqa or niqab in European countries, according to Maryam H’madoun at the Open Society Justice Initiative, that certain centrist politicians think it’s fine to stir up resentment against the women who wear these garments. “They think that the gains in appeasing far-right voters are higher than the losses,” H’amdoun says, “and that they are not really hurting Muslims, because so few women are affected.”

But H’madoun’s research suggests that this is not the case. “Once you have one regulation, it opens the door to other regulations,” she says, including by non-state institutions. A few years after Belgium passed a national ban on the burqa and niqab, a Belgian ice cream parlor saw fit to enact its own mini-ban on customers wearing headscarves.