The chaos and uncertainty at FVD could not have been even greater. The survival of the party hung by a thread. From all political layers in the Netherlands and those in Brussels, FVD’ers wanted to get rid of Thierry Baudet. But the creator and founder of the party did not want to budge and now has the support of the party members. What remains?
At Forum for Democracy, nothing went without verbal or legal violence in recent weeks.
The referendum, with which Baudet regains control of the party, is also controversial. The results had only just arrived, or (former) party members already reported that they were going to court in an attempt to declare the members’ consultation invalid.
Anyone who looks through the chaos through his eyelashes will see that Baudet has finally got his way. He is now surrounded by the people who support him. Critics have run away or been turned away. Baudet is the party.
‘Without Baudet, FVD is unstructured’
Chris Aalberts, the journalist who follows FVD from the very beginning, agrees. “If Baudet had been voted out, that would also apply to FVD.” Actually, there was no choice at all, Aalberts believes.
“When Baudet is gone, FVD will be just as unstructured as all those splitters now. There is no organization, no idea and no common philosophy.”
Aalberts recently published a book about FVD and Baudet: The party that is me. The title couldn’t have been more striking at this point.
Now that more than three-quarters of the party members have elected Baudet as party leader, he has the right to form a new board, make a new list of candidates for the House of Representatives elections and set the political agenda.
Baudet was regularly associated with far-right ideas
What can we expect from that agenda? In the successful campaign for the Provincial Council elections in the spring of 2019, the now expelled Henk Otten hammered on three themes: climate, immigration and purchasing power.
Otten’s story is now known. He could no longer agree with Baudet’s course after his ‘boreal speech’ in Zeist after the election victory and founded his own party in the Senate: GO.
The clear campaign themes could not prevent Baudet from making the news multiple times because he was associated with far-right ideas and views.
He did not clearly distance himself from a claim by an FVD’er that there is a link between intelligence and race, he had a long encounter with the far-right Jared Taylo and in January he accused “four Moroccans” of being on a train. ” dear friends “had been harassing when it was really a card check.
‘It will be a very small incestuous network’
“You could still see all those things as a slip of the tongue, but that has now been shattered”, says Aalberts. He sees that a party now remains with all people who are “very intimately” connected with each other. “It will be a very small incestuous network”, says Aalberts. The advantage, he says, is that voters now know where they stand. The question is whether that is also an advantage for Baudet.
“There is an increasing association with extremism and most people do not vote for that,” says Aalberts. A small foretaste of this became clear last Sunday when Maurice de Hond FVD gauged three seats. These were at their peak in April last year 28. Various polls have since shown a downward trend.
The corona crisis will dominate the campaign for the House of Representatives elections, but that is precisely a theme that Baudet is not very busy with. He is involved with conspiracy thinkers.
“He gets little support in this. Actually only from people from the boreal bunker”, says Aalberts. “FVD should have been a broad party on the right, but anti-Semitism and discrimination have lingered.”
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