“However impressive Marine Le Pen is, the Front National carries toxic
baggage,” the Ukip leader said. “The best example is the comments
by Jean-Marie Le Pen earlier this week.”

Mr Wilders blamed the setback on the “65 per cent” of his Freedom
Party’s voters who had “stayed at home” amid low Dutch turnout
estimated at around 34 per cent but admitted “the truth is that the
exit polls are disappointing”.

Lucas Hartong, the most senior MEP for Mr Wilders’ PVV refused to campaign in
the EU elections because he warned last month that the link with the Front
National and the Austrian far-Right was wrong and would prove to be an
electoral disaster.

“I am not at all surprised at the result. It’s what I warned of. I think
there will be an internal fight now, people will want to work with Farage
and to drop Le Pen,” he said.

“These parties have a tendency to anti-Semitism. Most PVV voters want to
work with people like Ukip. They didn’t come out because they were concerned.”

Mr Hartong revealed that in 2011 he and his three colleagues in the European
Parliament entered into talks with Mr Farage but that the proposal to form
an alliance had been personally rejected by Mr Wilders, who now says he
would like to work with Ukip in the future.

“It was Wilders who blocked it. My question is why did he want to work
with Le Pen and not Farage?,” he said.

Esther Voet, the director of the influential Dutch Information and
Documentation on Israel Centre, said that the comments by Mr Le Pen had
reminded voters of the Front National’s past links to anti-Semitism, a
political taboo in the Netherlands.

“I’m sure a lot people planning to vote for him changed their minds,”
she said.

Amid a French backlash over her father’s comments about Ebola on Tuesday, Miss
Le Pen insisted the comments had been “distorted” and that he had
meant to say that the deadly virus would act as a form of brutal population
control.

“He wasn’t talking about immigration, he was talking about African
demographics, he was talking about world demographics,” she said.

“It was perhaps a disillusioned observation that was a bit pessimistic,
but it had absolutely nothing to do with immigration.”