Thierry Baudet can only save the Forum for Democracy by stepping down completely from the board. He has made himself completely impossible indoors in recent days. Unfortunately, the sacrifices he made today and yesterday are a sham.
For years, the party has been jumping from riot via fuss to scandal, almost without exception at the hands of the party leader and / or the administrative failure of the JFVD. Most recent low point was yet another Nazi belch from the JFVD corner, after which perpetrators were promoted and whistleblowers expelled or resigned under pressure. Not only incredibly harmful to the thousands of well-meaning JFVD-ers who are warming up to politics through our youth association. But also disastrous for the representatives of FVD who every day do their utmost for our voters to carry out our party program.
Excellent representatives of the people, and an excellent program, which time and again suffers serious damage due to the increasingly uncontrolled behavior of party leader Baudet and a government that is unable to contain him. People’s representatives who are repeatedly confronted with controversial drivel from Baudet and who have to answer for matters that are not at all in our program and that do not belong to our party.
So now we had a weekend behind us in which after three days of meetings about the question ‘what shall we do about neo-Nazis’ the answer was: actually nothing at all. A weekend in which the party leader would rather flicker the whole party in the fireplace than simply proceed to fumigation, firing and expelling wrong elements. A weekend in which Nazi rioters are better protected than the good name, honor and integrity of the roughly one hundred FVD representatives. People’s representatives who, according to the sometimes desperate conversations I had with them this weekend, no longer dare to show themselves in the schoolyard or sports club.
The smokescreens that have been raised about trial by media, about disguised whether or not to remain on the board and the larmoyant ‘sacrifices’ that should illustrate this are not thick enough to distract from the facts. The media do not justify messages propagating Nazism. The media does not always flirt with conspiracy theories and types of questionable alloi. The media does not keep a rotten youth administration in power. The media do not call representatives of the people who have mild criticism shouting, ‘I am the party’, but do not stand up against radical bluster. The media does not appoint a proven, repeatedly Nazi dredge-posting idiot as fraction employee. The media is not losing tracked seats at a dizzying pace with riots and slips. The media does not maintain an internal culture of fear in which hardly anyone dares to criticize content. The media does not destroy an entire batch in a weekend because they do not want to admit their mistake and correct it.
Only one person does that within FVD, and that is party leader Baudet.
But doesn’t he take responsibility? Doesn’t he sacrifice himself, under the false frame that there is really nothing wrong, that the FVD-ers who want to distance themselves from Nazism to the bone are really just simple souls who garden in a mean left media frame? (Interesting question: if nothing’s wrong and it’s all frame where only stupid people kick in, why sacrifice a few positions? But this aside.)
It’s a farce. Someone who has behaved in this way, as Baudet did this weekend alone, both openly and privately, someone who damages a party so badly, would not only be completely untenable on the board in any normal party, but would be instantly banned. It’s the same pattern as with the radical JFVDers: misconduct is rewarded.
I almost put the scissors in my FVD membership card. The smoking ruins of what was once the largest party in the Netherlands smelled unsavory brown fumes. But it was precisely the messianic martyrdom of Thierry Baudet and his insane murmuring about ‘trial by media’ that made me put the scissors back in the kitchen drawer. Forum for Democracy deserves a better fate.
This is my ultimate attempt to make the choice, together with all those great people within FVD, for what politics should be about: working for our voters on the implementation of our program. That program has not changed significantly since I joined in 2017. The leader of our party did, and I didn’t sign up for that.
As a political one side show becomes the main act and riots, you have no business in the party board of our FVD. So I’m not going to leave. I will stick to my demand that Thierry Baudet should leave the board, not be on an electoral list and that we throw extremist elements out of the party without further ado, and not after three days of palavering ‘put administrative remoteness’ or other weak hassle. There is a chance that the board (effectively without prejudice to the leadership of Baudet, do not be fooled) will expel me for this. That would mean that within (J) FVD it is better to propagate Nazi ideas than to speak out against it. So be it, at least I tried. I invite my fellow (candidate) representatives of the people to speak about this in accordance with their conscience.
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