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A survey released on Tuesday by polling firm Ipsos Mori showed a massive gap among Europeans between the perception and the reality of local Muslim populations, revealing the impact of years of Islamophobic rhetoric by Europe’s increasingly powerful far-right political parties.
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In a survey covering more than 40 countries, the largest gap between perception and reality was in France, where the average French resident estimates that the local Muslim population comprises 31 percent of the country's total, almost four times greater than the real number, which is 7.5 percent.
On Tuesday France approved the extension of a state of emergency in advance of the upcoming Presidential elections which pits a far-right Islamophobic candidate against an ultra-right Islamophobic candidate.
French residents also reported the greatest overestimation of the growth of the local Muslim population. The average prediction was that Muslims would make up 40 percent of the French population in four years’ time – almost five times the 8.3 percent predicted by a Pew Research report.
In Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel just announced a ban on headscarves in a move seen by many as an attempt to court white nationalist voters in advance of next year’s elections, residents overestimated the Muslim population by 21 percent, with the majority reporting Muslims as making up 21 percent of the German population, four times greater than the actual 5 percent.
In Great Britain, where the explicitly racist UKIP party gained prominence during the Brexit campaign by stoking anti-immigration fears, residents reported a local Muslim population 3 times greater than in reality, thinking that Muslims made up 15 percent of the population rather than the reality-based 4.8 percent.
In the Netherlands, where the virulently Islamophobic Freedom Party leader Geert Wilders leads the polls despite his recent hate crimes conviction for stoking fears about Moroccan immigrants, respondents overestimated the predicted growth of the Muslim population by almost 4 times, with most saying Muslims would make up 26 percent of the population by 2020, rather than the 6.9 percent predicted by Pew Research.
The survey also asked about perceptions of a wide range of social issues, ranging from a woman’s right to choose to same-sex marriage and compiled overall results to create an “Index of Ignorance” attempting to measure which countries populations had the largest gaps between perception and reality. The survey measured the U.S. as having the fifth-biggest gap, putting it just behind India, China, South Africa, and Taiwan.
Interestingly, the Netherlands and Great Britain were ranked as the countries with the overall smallest gap between perception and reality, further highlighting the power of Islamophobic rhetoric in those countries given the vast gap in their respective perceptions of the Muslim populations.
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