Public libraries across the Netherlands are removing from the shelves children’s books depicting a black-faced Zwarte Piet, a side-kick to Sinterklaas, in the latest sign that the country is turning the page on a festive figure widely seen as being racist.

For at least a decade, there have been protests against the practice of white people with blackened faces, curly wigs and exaggerated bright red lips depicting the character at the nationwide parades held in early December to herald the feast of Saint Nicholas.

The need to socially distance due to the coronavirus pandemic has ensured that such high-street festivities will not be possible this year. But the debate over the portrayal of Zwarte Piet has continued, not least in response to the decision by librarians to start removing books containing images of the character, which first appeared in print in 1850, for being “contrary to good morals”.

“Everywhere there is a growing awareness that Zwarte Piet gives a stereotypical image of a certain part of the population and the libraries are moving along with this,” the director at the Association of Public Libraries, Anton Kok, told the Het Algemeen Dagblad newspaper.

“Numerous books have been taken down over time for being ‘contrary to morals’. I am thinking, for example, of the children’s books in which the population of the Dutch East Indies was dismissed as patjakkers [low-life rascals]. Zwarte Piet is also contrary to good morals as far as I am concerned. It is more that [libraries] are linking up with the spirit of the times.”

There has been a slow but unmistakeable shift in public opinion in recent years about the depiction of Zwarte Piet, Sinterklaas’s Moor servant, expressed most significantly by the Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Rutte, who has dressed up as Zwarte Piet in the past and has defended the practice on the grounds that it is a simple representation of a figure that “is black”, said this summer that his opinions had changed. “When I met people who said, ‘I feel incredibly discriminated against because the Piet is black,’ I thought: that is the last thing you want at the Sinterklaas party,” he said.

A survey released last week by the current affairs programme EenVandaag of 29,000 members of its longstanding opinion panel found that support for the traditional depiction of Piet has fallen from 89% in 2013 to 55%.

The Belgian publisher Clavis, the largest supplier of Dutch language children’s books, has said it will no longer support authors who include a Zwarte Piet in their pages with red lips, a frizzy wig and gold earrings.

The company destroyed 7,000 books containing such images at the end of last month, and Zwarte Piet is being represented in a host of new ways including as a white boy with soot on the face in a reference to his trips down chimneys to hand out sweets to children.

There has also been international pressure for change. In 2015, a United Nations committee on the elimination of racial discrimination urged the Dutch government to “actively promote the elimination” of the racial stereotyping implicit in the character. Google said last month that it would not allow adverts to be shown on web pages or videos featuring a “black face” Zwarte Piet.

Kok said the Dutch Association of Public Libraries could not order all its members to remove the offending books but that librarians were making the right decisions without need for guidance.

He said: “White children don’t care about another Pete and black children find it strange and nasty, and that is what matters. Some people also like fascism. And yes, that sounds crude, but I mean that a tribe cannot determine our policy. We see that libraries are taking on that responsibility en masse.”

• The headline to this article was amended on 15 November 2020 to remove a reference to Christmas. Although the figure of Father Christmas arose from the traditions associated with St Nicholas, the saint’s feast day of 6 December is a distinct celebration, which is also marked in some countries on its eve.