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| Will Thierry Baudet, Far-Right Populist eventually survive? |
The outcome deprived Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s governing coalition of a majority in the Senate, giving the largest share of seats to a relatively new far-right party led by an ostentatious pseudo-intellectual, Thierry Baudet.
The victory by Baudet’s Forum for Democracy party, or FvD, however, is not proof that the Netherlands has taken a sharp rightward turn. The parliament is highly fragmented, and the political landscape is in flux, but the Netherlands remains a nation characterized by compromise. The question going forward is whether Baudet will manage to persuade more Dutch voters to follow him to the right, or whether his new celebrity status will make them look more closely at his views and turn away after discovering they do not share them.
After his party jumped from just two seats to 13, Baudet declared in his victory speech, “We stand here in the rubble of what was once the most beautiful civilization,” adding, “Minerva’s owl spreads its wings at dusk.” An allusion to imagery used by the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the term promptly started trending on social media in the Netherlands. To some, it was another preposterous display by the 36-year-old former academic, who has accused the government led by Rutte’s center-right Freedom and Democracy party, or VVD, of allowing “people with cultures completely different from ours” to enter the country. To others, it was a sign of a renewed nationalist push in a struggling European Union.
To be sure, Baudet scored an impressive victory. But a significant portion of his support came from former backers of another populist figure, Geert Wilders, who saw his Party for Freedom drop from nine to five seats in the upper house.
Rutte’s VVD lost just one seat, for a second-place finish, but his four-party coalition, which had only a thin majority in the Senate, lost seven. The other big winner was the Green Left party, which jumped from four to nine seats. Rutte retains a majority in the lower house and, with it, the prime minister’s office. But it is clear that Dutch politics is changing and becoming far more fragmented. The new upper house will comprise a record number of political parties, diminishing the power of the traditional political formations.
Baudet’s support was notably weak in some major cities, which remain bastions of the tolerance for which the Dutch are known. In Amsterdam, Baudet’s FvD finished in an embarrassing sixth place, behind the animal rights formation, Party for the Animals. The Green Left remains the largest there.
One reason for Baudet’s surprise win was the way he brazenly leveraged a deadly attack in the city of Utrecht two days before the elections. The attack by a Turkish-born man who killed three people is being investigated by police as a possible act of terrorism. Other parties suspended campaigning, but Baudet saw an opportunity to make his case. Without conclusive information on the motive for the shootings, Baudet immediately blamed the government’s immigration policies. His FvD did not fare well in Utrecht, interestingly, but it finished first in Rotterdam, a city with a large Muslim population.
Read more at: Will the Netherlands’ Rising Far-Right Star Survive the Scrutiny
