How the Suave New Dutch Far Right Nearly Won an Election

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Before the European Parliament election, which took place Thursday in the Netherlands, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte chose to debate just one rival: Thierry Baudet, leader of a startup party called Forum for Democracy (FvD) that didn’t even exist before late 2016.

“Perhaps he just found me the most interesting person to talk to,” Baudet, 36, deadpanned in an interview Friday in Amsterdam. In reality, the FvD led in almost all the Dutch polls for the last few weeks of the campaign, and Rutte was understandably worried. The traditional far-right threat to his center-right People’s Party — anti-Islam zealot Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party — appeared to have collapsed in the polls. But Baudet was the new menace from the right, and an improved version at that.

Baudet’s story and what ultimately happened in the Dutch election are both important for understanding the European Union’s current internal dynamics. Parts of the euroskeptic right are getting more sophisticated and articulate and thus better situated to discuss alliances with other nationalist parties. But the euroskeptic right is not winning — at least not yet.

I first became interested in Baudet in 2016 when he, a conservative academic, set about organizing a nonbinding referendum in the Netherlands on the advisability of Ukraine’s association agreement with the European Union. The low-turnout vote went against the Netherlands’ signing it, but Rutte’s government approved it anyway. Baudet wouldn’t give up: He set up FvD to fight for more direct democracy, as opposed to the backroom horsetrading traditional for Dutch politics, and against the European Union, which Baudet sees as eroding national identities. During the 2017 legislative election campaign, few took Baudet seriously. But I saw him campaign and couldn’t help but notice the attraction he held for voters on the right who sought a more sober, smarter alternative to the strident obstructionism of Wilders and to Rutte’s wishy-washy centrism.

FvD won two parliamentary seats in 2017. Baudet moved his grand piano from his apartment to his parliamentary office. (He says he plays Bach every day and is practicing the Schumann piano concerto, which he plans to perform eventually with an orchestra.) He set about, as he says, professionalizing his party — and himself turning from a public intellectual into a professional politician.

On Friday, the day after the election, Baudet was cleaning up a basement space in the central Amsterdam building where the FvD headquarters are located: The office is expanding. The political startup claims to have a membership of 36,000, a lot by Dutch standards. That’s something Wilders never attempted to achieve: He is his party’s only official member.

Watching Baudet wield a broom and struggle with a vacuum cleaner, I had my doubts about the professionalization bit. At the debate with Rutte, Baudet had unexpectedly asked the prime minister when was the last time he had cried. Rutte’s dignified response was that he’d cried when his older sister died four years ago. “I wanted to know what’s behind the eternal smile,” Baudet says. “It backfired a little.”

So I asked him how he’d answer the question himself. “I cry almost every time when I come home and hug my fiancée. Those are tears of joy,” he replied. And then: “Maybe you need to be flatter to be a good leader, maybe that’s true.”

If Baudet’s strong emotions sometimes get in the way of his political skills, his staunchly anti-EU, anti-immigrant message went down well enough with Dutch voters that he almost completely supplanted Wilders, with his provincial Limburg accent, on the far-right flank of Dutch politics. According to exit polls, Wilders’s party has lost almost all of its European Parliament representation, while the FvD went from zero to three seats.

The Dutch are highly educated, worldly people, most of whom speak two or more languages. Baudet’s message is targeted at a sophisticated audience. He says he’s a fan of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s idea that cultural hegemony, not just political power, is what changes society:

We will use our political momentum to try to create a cultural shift in this country. We are not merely fighting certain policies, we are fighting the mindset that created those policies in the first place. And we want to fight that not just through policies but through educating a new intellectual class, a new generation of journalists, writers, museum directors, creating new prizes for artists who make things that are much more supportive of the human soul than most of contemporary art is. Ultimately, to address the problem of modern art is much more important, much more fundamental than to address immigration. Immigration is what happens all the way downstream.

This narrative scares leftist intellectuals, who hear echoes of the Nazis’ attempt to redefine culture by proclaiming some art to be degenerate. Baudet dismisses such parallels as “completely bogus,” saying Nazism was the exact opposite of his individualist, nonmilitant ideology, and besides, it “produced terrible architecture, terrible art.” Baudet’s take on nationalism is inclusive of everyone willing to assimilate and adopt the European cultural legacy.

Baudet rejects political correctness; for example, he eloquently defends relationships in which the man dominates the woman. He combines his views with a polished narrative, intellectual name-dropping, and a taste in classical music and old masters that appeal to those Dutch who are fed up with the country’s erstwhile flirtations with multiculturalism — of which, it must be said, Rutte disapproves, too. Baudet is not brutal or fanatical, but he says things others don’t dare.

His sophistication is also reflected in his approach to nationalist politics in the European Parliament. Unlike Wilders, who unequivocally threw in his lot with Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, the architect of a nationalist coalition in the future parliament, Baudet has stuck with a quieter group of nationalist parties, which includes Poland’s ruling political force, Law and Justice (PiS). When I asked him what he thought of Salvini’s project, Baudet said he admired the Italian, but was also noncommittal.

Baudet said he’d like to see all the euroskeptical parties come together in the European Parliament, but for that to happen they’d need to overcome their differences. For example, the Flemish nationalists support Catalan independence, while Spanish ones are vehemently opposed to it. And then there’s the matter of Russia; in the debate, Rutte called Baudet a “Russia-hugger” for opposing the EU’s sanctions on Russia as detrimental to the Dutch economic interests. For their part, the Polish PiS and the Sweden Democrats, for example, are sworn enemies of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Baudet explains in his professorial manner, channeling Halford Mackinder, the British intellectual who was one of the founding fathers of geopolitics:

Among the euroskeptics, there are Atlanticists and Mackinderians, who believe continental powers, from the Netherlands to, say, Poland must form a kind of bridge between Eurasia and the Atlantic world. I think it’s going to be a very interesting conversation. I don’t think it will in any way be a breaking point in any of our collective undertakings. We are all reasonable and moderate people, and we can talk about it.

What Baudet sees as the common ground for the euroskeptic parties is an end to the European project in its current form, with its supranational structures and the need for all 27 or 28 member states to agree on every important matter. He criticizes its regulatory overreach, citing as an example a recent ban on electric pulse fishing, a controversial practice widely adopted by Dutch fishermen. His vision of an ideal Europe is “rather like the United Nations”:

The EU is constantly boasting that it represents 500 million people in trade negotiations. But the trouble is, those 500 million people don’t want the same thing. The Italians want a very different deal than the French. The French want a very different trade deal than the Dutch. What we have is a situation where one size fits no one. That’s the case with immigration, the euro, trade agreements. And if you break up that straitjacket into an open platform where we can choose to negotiate together on specific issues, I think countries that have common interests will quickly find each other and agree on things.

Again, I disagree with Baudet — but I can see how, with this approach, he could bring some Dutch coalition-building skill to the fractious nationalist movement. I can also see how his carefully reasoned presentation can appeal to Dutch voters more than Wilders’ crude anti-immigrant rhetoric does. It’s a siren’s song rather than an exhortation.

But how easily Baudet appears to have dispatched Wilders, who was only recently scaring Europe by threatening to win a plurality in the 2017 Dutch election, is not a good sign for the European nationalist movement. It shows how fickle its supporters are, how susceptible to personal charisma, how uncertain about specific ideas and policies to support.

“It shows that many Wilders voters weren’t really his dedicated supporters,” says Koen Vossen from Radboud University in Nijmegen, who has written a book about Wilders. “Now many of them give Baudet a chance, though also without much conviction. These voters want to express their dissatisfaction and look for the candidate who is scaring the elite the most at the moment. As the elites are by now used to Wilders, Baudet has become the man to watch.”

At the core, nationalist parties, especially in the wealthier European countries, ride the protest vote, which is by definition not constructive — and thus rarely dominant, especially when the economy is relatively crisis-free, as it is in most of Europe today. Even if Rutte believed the polls when they showed the FvD in the lead, Baudet didn’t win the European Parliament election in the Netherlands.

According to exit polls, it was the Labour Party of Frans Timmermans, the center-left’s lead candidate for commission president, that won a plurality Thursday — a big surprise after the party’s collapse in the 2017 national election. Rutte’s party came in second, and, relieved, he congratulated Labour for a good showing. FvD came in only third with 11 percent of the vote, according to the polls — a success for the young party, but well within the usual number nationalist parties get in northern Europe.

It can be fascinating to watch the intellectual evolution of the European right. One can find signs of the movement’s growing sophistication in eastern Europe and Scandinavia, too. But these parties are still too disparate and too angry to come together as a cohesive force. That’s why they most likely won’t be calling the tune in the incoming European Parliament. The apparent Dutch election result is just one harbinger of things to come: It’s way too early to write off Europe’s centrist establishment.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Stacey Shick at sshick@bloomberg.net

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Leonid Bershidsky is Bloomberg Opinion's Europe columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.

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