Members of the extreme right-wing grouping Nederlandse Volks-Unie regularly attend council meetings about refugees outside their own home towns, the group’s leader has told the Telegraaf.

‘It is an open democracy,’ Constant Kusters told the paper. ‘We are doing all we can to make sure as few refugees as possible come here, in a legal and peaceful way.’

Several mayors have said they think outsiders are turning up at meetings and heckling speakers. Rotterdam’s mayor, Ahmed Aboutaleb, said the audience at a meeting in IJsselmonde he recently attended ‘did not reflect the neighbourhood’.

Joseph Vos, the mayor of Steenbergen, where feelings have been running high, said many outsiders were among those shouting down speakers earlier this week.

Kusters said it would be nonsense to ban non-locals from attending meetings. ‘How many councillors and alderman take decisions about places they don’t live in?’ he told the paper.

In 2013, Kusters was found guilty of insulting foreigners and discrimination at a rally in the southern city of Enschede. During the demonstration he and his supporters chanted ‘the Netherlands for the Dutch, own people first’ and carried White Power flags.