AMSTERDAM — The politically charged hate-speech trial of Dutch firebrand lawmaker Geert Wilders got underway Monday with Wilders boycotting the opening.

Instead, his lawyer, Geert-Jan Knoops, read out a statement that the anti-Islam lawmaker published last Friday in which he called his case a ‘‘political trial’’ targeting freedom of speech.

It is not the first time Wilders, whose party is riding high in opinion polls ahead of parliamentary elections due next March, has been prosecuted. He was acquitted on hate-speech charges in 2011 after complaints about his fierce criticism of Islam.

The trial, which is scheduled to last more than three weeks, centers on comments the far-right politician made before and after Dutch municipal elections in 2014. At one meeting in a Hague cafe he asked supporters whether they wanted more or fewer Moroccans in the Netherlands, sparking a chant of ‘‘Fewer! Fewer! Fewer!’’

‘‘We’ll take care of it,’’ he replied, in a video recording played in court.

Reading from evidence in the case, Presiding Judge Hendrik Steenhuis cited policy workers from Wilders’s populist Freedom Party as saying that the audience had been instructed beforehand how to react to Wilders’s questions.

Wilders has refused to back away from the comments.

Associated Press