22 The Nation. April 30/May 7, 2018
party’s congress in January of last year.
With less than 5 percent unemployment and a healthy
3 percent economic growth, the Netherlands has been
faring better than many other EU nations. Still, Baudet’s
apocalyptic rhetoric has proved a hit among voters who are
anxious about national identity, suspicious of the European
Union, and disenchanted with Dutch politics-as-usual—as
manifested by the current four- party, right-of-center gov-
erning coalition, once again led by Rutte, and installed in
October after a grueling six-month negotiation.S
ome of baudet’s rapidly rising support comes
directly from Wilders’s PVV. But he is also
expanding and diversifying the base of the radi-
cal right, says Leo Lucassen, research director at
the International Institute for Social History. As
Lucassen, an expert on migration who frequently calls
out far-right fearmongers, told me when I met with him
in Amsterdam, “Baudet is popular among new voters, but
he is also attractive to higher- educated people who always
found Wilders too lowbrow or too coarse. Although
Baudet’s ideas are clearly very extreme, he packages them
in a tremendously charming, attractive way.”
FvD meetings attract a disproportionate number of
young white men. But the party has also found support
among ethnic minorities and the intellectual elite. Among
its early supporters was Frank Ankersmit, an internation-
ally renowned philosopher of history. (Ankersmit left the
party in December.) And one of its initial top candidates in
the City Council elections in Amsterdam this past March
was Yernaz Ramautarsing, a libertarian of East Indian de-
scent born in Suriname, who maintains that black people
have a lower IQ than other races. A follower of Ayn Rand,
Ramautarsing first became known as a vocal critic of “left-
wing indoctrination” at Dutch universities. Following a
controversy over homophobic comments, he withdrew
from the City Council race. But Baudet’s party still won
three out of the 45 available seats in those elections.
Baudet is certainly no Wilders. For one thing, he is
smarter, more photogenic, and much more coy. The
54-year-old Wilders, born in the southern province of
Limburg, was raised a Roman Catholic, though his moth-
er is of Indonesian descent. He founded the PVV in 2006,
after a 14-year career in the
right-liberal VVD. The tar-
get of frequent death threats,
Wilders has lived under
permanent police protec-
tion for more than 13 years.
Baudet, 20 years younger, is
from a nonreligious middle-
class family in Haarlem de-
scended from 18th-century
Huguenot exiles. He learned
Latin and Greek in high
school and exudes the aris-
tocratic air of a Leiden Uni-
versity fraternity member.
After earning undergraduate
degrees in history and law,
he finished a PhD thesis inGeert Wilders,
whose supporters
protested in 2010
outside the court
where he was
charged with inciting
hatred against
Muslims (below).TOP: CC; BOTTOM: REUTERS / UNITED PHOTOS / TOUSSAINT KLUITERS“We’re being
weakened,
under-
mined....
Malevolent,
aggressive
elements
are being
smuggled
into our
social body.”
— Thierry Baudetto save the Netherlands—and Western civilization—
from their impending downfall.
For Baudet is convinced that his country is on the brink
of disaster. He believes that Dutch political and intellectual
elites harbor a pathological hatred of their own national
culture. Fed by cultural Marxism, postcolonial guilt, victim
culture, and political correctness, this oikophobia—Baudet’s
fancy term for “fear of the home”—has sapped the coun-
try’s defense mechanisms, leaving it open to the invasion of
non-Western values. These threats are embodied particu-
larly in Muslim immigrants and refugees.
“The West is suffering from an autoimmune disor-
der,” Baudet said when he addressed his party’s congress
in January of 2017. “Part of our organism—an impor-
tant part: our immune system, that which should pro-
tect us—has turned against us. We’re being weakened,
undermined, surrendered in every respect. Malevolent,
aggressive elements are being smuggled into our social
body in unprecedented numbers, while true causes and
consequences are kept hidden. Police reports about vio-
lent incidents at refugee centers are not made public. The
attorney general’s office looks the other way when it runs
into sharia courts.”
Instead, Baudet proudly defends Western values,
which he predictably associates with the Judeo-Christian
tradition—but in which he less predictably includes the
defense of women’s and gay rights against the religious
intolerance of fundamentalist Islam. His party has pro-
posed a “Law in Defense of Dutch Values” that, among
other things, would prohibit arranged marriages, de-
mand that the Holocaust be taught in all schools, and
ban any face-covering garments, including balaclavas
and niqabs, from public spaces.
Like Wilders, Baudet is a so-called Euroskeptic.
While immigration and multiculturalism have been “di-
luting” national values from below, he says, the sover-
eignty of the Dutch nation-state has been further un-
dermined by its subservience to the European Union
and other international bodies. “Control over our lives
is insidiously and increasingly taken away from us by
devious acts of surrender that transfer our sovereignty
to impersonal political mega-projects in which citizens
have lost all forms of democratic control,” he said at the