Immigration has become a prominent issue in West European politics and anti-immigration parties have established themselves as significant factors. This paper examines the spectacular rise of the Dutch Freedom Party since its foundation in 2005. Our explanation extends most previous studies on the far-right because instead of treating parties as passive, we scrutinize the impact of strategic moves of both established parties and the populist challenger. Agent-based simulations are used, which are most appropriate for the specification of complex processes of voters updating their party preferences and adaptively learning party leaders reacting on competitors and their environment. Our outcomes reveal that, although the stance of the PVV deviates more than any other party from the mean voter’s position on immigration, the party benefits most when this topic is salient. A vote seeking strategy of Wilders results in considerable increases in electoral strength and a large ideological shift to the left on the socio-economic dimension. Remarkably, ''opportunistically'' vote-maximizing is not more successful than ''democratically'' consulting the preferences of the current supporters. An adaptive radical right party seems here to stay: even when established parties strategically adapt to the new challenge and the principal issue is socio-economic policy rather than immigration, Geert Wilders can successfully find a niche.
