April 30/May 7, 2018 The Nation.^21

Amsterdam

O

n the first day of june in 2017, dutch national television crews were at the ready

when a moving truck pulled into the stately cobblestone courtyard of the parliament

in The Hague. The truck’s load, a black grand piano, had been the subject of conver-

sation for months. As the movers wheeled the blanket-covered instrument into the

parliament building under the watchful eyes of its 34-year-old owner, it was clear they

were ushering in a fresh chapter in the history of Dutch right-wing populism. The

movement to save Dutch national culture has a new leader—and he plays Brahms.

cal assassination since the 17th century. Two years later, a

radicalized Dutch-Moroccan Muslim murdered progres-

sive filmmaker and Islam critic Theo van Gogh in broad

daylight on a busy Amsterdam street. Both deaths changed

the face of Dutch politics. Since then, disagreements over

national identity and the integration of immigrants have

dominated public debate and divided the country into

sharply opposed camps. In topic and tone, the boundaries

of the acceptable have been shifted to the right. Fueled

by social media, mainstream political discourse has gone

places that were unthinkable 20 years ago.

Baudet is poised to push it even further. He is the

leader of the Forum for Democracy (FvD), which he

founded as a think tank in 2015. Transformed into a

political party only six months before the March 2017

elections, the FvD won a surprising 1.8 percent of the

vote, good for two seats. (The Dutch electoral system is

strictly representative, making it relatively easy for small

parties to break through but almost impossible for any

single party to win an absolute majority.) By June, when

the piano was delivered, the polls pegged the FvD at five

seats. Ten months later, Baudet’s party now boasts more

than 20,000 dues-paying members and a fast-growing

youth movement. Polls indicate that if elections were

held today, Baudet would win as many as 15 seats—and

he hasn’t hit his ceiling yet. “I think 30 seats are within

reach,” Baudet declared in a television interview in De-

cember. According to a leading pollster, such a gain is

not unlikely. This would make Baudet a candidate for

prime minister—a position he has said he doesn’t covet

but is willing to take on. After all, he says, someone has

Pim Fortuyn (left)

and Theo van Gogh,

whose assassinations

changed the face of

Dutch politics.

LEFT: AP PHOTO / SERGE LIGTENBERG; RIGHT: CC 3.0

Three months earlier, the Netherlands had held par-

liamentary elections. To the relief of many on the left and

right alike, the anti-immigrant Freedom Party (PVV),

led by the peroxide-blond populist Geert Wilders, failed

to win the victory that some earlier polls had predict-

ed. Still, it earned a record 1.4 million votes, coming

in second with 20 of the 150 available seats, behind the

neoliberal People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy

(VVD) of Prime Minister Mark Rutte, but far ahead of

the social-democratic Labor Party, which was govern-

ing with the VVD and saw its support decimated. As

the crestfallen social democrats resigned themselves to

a stint in the opposition, the other major parties agreed

that Wilders, too, should be barred from joining the

government. His radical anti-Islam positions—he wants

to shutter all mosques and ban the Quran—placed him

too far outside of the mainstream. And his obstruction-

ist attitude did not jibe with the Dutch political culture

of consensus, coalition, and compromise. Given his be-

havior, some commentators openly wondered whether

Wilders aspired to govern at all. In the wake of the elec-

tion, disillusion began to set in among the PVV’s dis-

gruntled constituency.

The man who stood to benefit most from Wilders’s

deflation was Thierry Baudet, the freshman deputy who

excused himself from a parliamentary debate last June

to personally supervise the arrival of his piano. Shortly

after the election, he had requested official permission

to move the instrument from his Amsterdam apartment

to his new office in The Hague, making good on a flip-

pant campaign promise. The piano was a necessary part

of his “entourage,” he argued, and would allow him to

decompress in between sessions with some Schubert or

Brahms. After three months, Baudet got his wish.

Thierry Henri Philippe Baudet, who just turned 35, is

an intellectual who claims to loathe politics, modern art,

and popular culture. He is also the rising star of the Dutch

alt-right. His flamboyant image and rapid ascent resemble

that of Pim Fortuyn, the gay populist pioneer who railed

against Muslim immigrants and was killed by an environ-

mental activist in May 2002, in the country’s first politi-

Polls

indicate that

if elections

were held

today,

Baudet

would win

as many as

15 seats in

the Dutch

parliament.

Sebastiaan Faber, who was born and raised in Amsterdam, is a

professor of Hispanic studies at Oberlin College. His most recent

book is Memory Battles of the Spanish Civil War: History,

Fiction, Photography.