The EU is a 'monster,' Dutch nationalist leader says, and it mustn't have more power

Dutch populist leader Geert Wilders has described the European Union as a "monster" that must not be given any more decision-making power by its member states.

Rejecting the idea of EU-wide taxation and ever-greater political union, Wilders told CNBC that the region needed less integration, not more.

"Europe is a kind of monster, the European Union, if you give it more power they only want more and they won't give it back," the leader of the Party for Freedom said Sunday.

Wilders argued that the economic cooperation that underpins the EU had morphed into deeply embedded political integration between its 27 members.

"It's too late to end it but please, let us take some of the powers back to the capitals, like [those] for immigration," he told CNBC's Steve Sedgwick at the Ambrosetti Forum in Italy this weekend.

"All of the politicians who are really out of sync with the electorate in Europe say, 'we want more integration,' but the people don't want that, they want their own [domestic] issues to be solved."

"I believe that the majority of the decision-making should be in the nation-state and the national parliaments," Wilders — an increasingly influential figure in European far-right politics — added.

His Party for Freedom (PVV) has become part of the political mainstream in recent years, upsetting the status quo in the Netherlands and beyond.

The rise in the party's popularity culminated in the PVV winning a landslide victory in the Netherlands' general election last November, taking 35 seats of the 150-seat Dutch House of Representatives.

The PVV had to look for coalition partners in order to form a majority government, however, and a deal was only reached when Wilders agreed he would not be the country's new prime minister. The