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Thierry Baudet

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Thierry Baudet
Baudet in 2018
Chairperson and Leader of Forum for Democracy
Incumbent
Assumed office
22 September 2016
Leader of Forum for Democracy in the House of Representatives
Incumbent
Assumed office
23 March 2017
Member of the House of Representatives
Incumbent
Assumed office
23 March 2017
Personal details
Born
Thierry Henri Philippe Baudet

(1983-01-28) 28 January 1983 (age 41)
Heemstede, Netherlands
Political partyForum for Democracy (FVD)
Residence(s)Amsterdam, Netherlands
Alma materUniversity of Amsterdam (BA, LLM)
Leiden University (PhD)
OccupationPolitician, author
Signature

Thierry Henri Philippe Baudet (born 28 January 1983) is a Dutch politician and author. He is the founder and leader of Forum for Democracy (FvD), and has been a member of the House of Representatives since 2017. He also serves as the party's parliamentary leader.[1] He is a controversial politician due to his political views.

Early life

Baudet was born in Heemstede into a family of partial Walloon ancestry. His forefather, Pierre Joseph Baudet, immigrated to the Batavian Republic in 1795 when his home in Hainaut was annexed by the French Republic, fleeing from conscription into the French Army. Baudet's great-great-grandmother, Ernestine van Heemskerck, was born in the Dutch East Indies and was of partly Indonesian parentage.[2]

Baudet attended the Haarlem gymnasium, i.e. a college preparatory school with compulsory Latin and Ancient Greek.[3] His first degree, from the University of Amsterdam, was in history, and from 2007 to 2012 he was a lecturer at Leiden University, where in 2012 he graduated as a Doctor of Philosophy with a thesis on national identity, European identity, and multiculturalism.[4] This was co-directed by the British philosopher Roger Scruton and was published in Dutch as The Assault on the Nation-State. An English translation was also published, called The Significance of Borders.[3]

Career

Thierry Baudet in 2020

Baudet was a post-doctoral fellow at Tilburg University in 2013.[4] He also wrote a newspaper column in NRC Handelsblad from 2011 to 2012.[4]

In 2016, he founded the Forum for Democracy (FvD, Template:Lang-nl), which became a political party, and he was elected along with Theo Hiddema to the House of Representatives in the 2017 general election.[5][6]

Baudet had his personal piano installed in his parliamentary office in the Hague. In 2018, he said that his current girlfriend was an Iranian refugee.[3]

In 2018, he was awarded the Prize for Liberty by the Flemish classical-liberal think tank Libera!.

Political views

Baudet is a national conservative and Eurosceptic, advocating for both the Netherlands' exit from the European Union and the eventual dissolution of the EU. He is against unskilled immigration into the Netherlands. In a speech he described immigration as causing a homeopathic dilution[7] of the Dutch culture, and in an interview said he wants to preserve the native cultures and ethnicities of Europe as they are.[8] He is opposed to Ukraine joining the EU. Forum for Democracy set up the 2016 Dutch Ukraine–European Union Association Agreement referendum with the GeenStijl website and the Burgercomité EU association, in which Baudet voted no.[9]

In November 2016, Baudet co-signed a letter, initiated by the journalists Billy Six and Joost Niemöller, which questioned the independence of the MH17 investigations and requested Donald Trump to press for a new investigation.[10] This led to criticism from surviving relatives.[11] In May 2018, he supported the Dutch cabinet in holding Russia accountable for the MH17 shootdown incident.[12] Baudet's WhatsApp chats were leaked to the media in 2020; these revealed his close contacts with Vladimir Kornilov[who?] and demonstrated a significant influence of Kornilov on Baudet's actions on Ukraine, the referendum and future anti-NATO campaigns. In the chats with his FvD colleagues, Baudet also alluded to financial support from Kornilov. Baudet disagreed with the conclusions drawn from these texts, and said that the text messages were quoted out of context.[13] In February 2022, after Russia officially recognized separatist regions in Ukraine as independent nations and deployed military troops to the Donbas, Baudet voiced his approval of Vladimir Putin's actions.[14] On 24 February 2022, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Baudet stated that Russia was "unnecessarily being vilified".[15] During a debate in parliament on February 28, he explicitly refused to condemn the invasion.[16]

Baudet has strong opinions on the arts, the topic of his book Oikofobie; he considers non-Western art and Western post-1900 modernism in visual arts inferior to Western Realism, encourages education and programmation of tonal music opposed to atonal music, and dislikes modern post-1950 architecture. In reaction to this, musicologist Yuri Landman warned Baudet for approaching the concept of degenerate art with his conservative criticism.[17]

Baudet frequently speaks about the perceived existence of a "party cartel", in which the main ruling parties of the Netherlands divide power among themselves and conspire towards the same goals, despite claiming to be competitors.[18] He is not religious, but he is sympathetic to Christian values. In an interview, he called himself an "agnostic cultural Christian".[19]

Baudet is critical of Islam and has expressed concern about both high levels and lack of assimilation of migrants from Islamic societies. He has stated his disagreement with the proposals made by another Dutch politician, Geert Wilders, to ban copies of the Quran. Meanwhile, he also praised Wilders as someone who "has put on the agenda the significant problem that we have with radical Islam in our time and Muslim immigration".[citation needed] Baudet has called for Islamic schools in the Netherlands to sign up with Western values. He has criticised both Dutch and wider European handling of immigration and assimilation. During the 2017 Dutch general election, Baudet was one of the few Dutch politicians who said he would form a coalition with Wilders' Party for Freedom.[20] Baudet has also expressed admiration for murdered Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, and both ideological and personality comparisons between the two men have been made by both Dutch and overseas media.[21][22]

In February 2018, Baudet was confronted with the question of whether there is a relation between IQ and race in a debate with Femke Halsema. Hiddema and the number two on Baudet's party list for the 2018 Dutch municipal elections in Amsterdam, Yernaz Ramautarsing, stated they believed it to be true while Baudet refused to answer the question. Deputy Prime Minister Kajsa Ollongren stated that Forum for Democracy is a bigger threat than the Party for Freedom and that members have an unhealthy fascination for race differences; Baudet made a complaint for defamation at an Amsterdam police station. Hiddema supported him as his advocate.[23] In February 2021, Elsevier reported it had uncovered WhatsApp messages sent by Baudet to fellow party members, in which he claims white people have a higher IQ than Hispanics and African-Americans. Baudet and several other members reportedly also sent messages in which they used racial slurs and expressed their opposition to interracial relationships.[24][25]

Baudet is an adherent of the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory[26][27][28] that suggests a calculated effort to destroy Western culture by academic and intellectual means.[29][30][31][32] Baudet accuses the European Union of being "a Cultural Marxist project, with the aim of destroying European Civilization".[33]

Baudet has been alleged to have stated that COVID-19 was introduced by George Soros to "steal freedom", a claim he denies. He has also allegedly made anti-semitic comments. Following these claims in November 2020, published by one of his party's Senators, Baudet temporarily resigned as leader of the party and the party allegedly split.[34][35] Soon he returned as party leader, but by then many party members had left Forum for Democracy, including the majority of the Senators and all of the party's members of the European Parliament.

In 2021, Baudet responded to an article about the migrant population of Brussels by tweeting that an "escape-strategy, Madagascar or something" was needed. This was widely perceived as a reference to the Madagascar Plan, the plan by the government of Nazi Germany to forcibly relocate the entire European Jewish population to Madagascar.[36][37][38][39]

Baudet and Members of Parliament of his party have repeatedly compared measures to combat the spread of COVID-19 to the persecution of Jews by Nazi Germany. In May 2021, this led to another split in the party.[40] In September 2021, Baudet attended a protest against the measures to combat COVID-19, in which several protesters wore Jewish badges, which drew condemnation.[41][42] This led five Jewish organisations to ask parliament to explicitly distance itself from comparisons of the measures with the persecution of Jews and the Holocaust.[43] In response, Baudet issued a tweet in which he stated that Jewish organisations "do not own the war", and wrote the word Holocaust within quotation marks, which was interpreted as an antisemitic dog whistle.[44] Baudet was widely condemned by other politicians and Jewish organisations.[45][46] He is pro-Russian, and has said that the 2022 war in Ukraine is the fault of the West.[47][48]

Published works

  • 2010: (ed. with Michiel Visser) Conservatieve Vooruitgang. De grootste denkers van de 20ste eeuw (Conservative progress. The greatest thinkers of the 20th century). Prometheus/Bert Bakker.
  • 2011: (ed. with Michiel Visser) Revolutionair Verval en de conservatieve vooruitgang in de 18de en 19de eeuw (Revolutionary decline and conservative progress in the 18th and 19th centuries). Prometheus/Bert Bakker.
  • 2012: Pro Europa dus tegen de EU (Pro Europe therefore against the EU). Elsevier
  • 2012: The Significance of Borders. Why representative government and the rule of law require nation-states. Brill Academic Publishers. PhD dissertation
  • 2012: De aanval op de natiestaat (The attack on the nation state). Prometheus/Bert Bakker.
  • 2013: Oikofobie. De angst voor het eigene (Oikophobia. The fear of home). Prometheus/Bert Bakker.
  • 2014: (ed. with Geert Mak) Thuis in de Tijd (At home in time). Prometheus/Bert Bakker. ISBN 9789035141988
  • 2014: (with Arie Boomsma) Van Bach tot Bernstein. Klassieke muziek voor iedereen (From Bach to Bernstein. Classical music for everyone). ISBN 9789044627084
  • 2014: Voorwaardelijke liefde (Conditional love. [Novel]). Amsterdam: Prometheus/Bert Bakker. ISBN 9789044626810
  • 2017: Breek het partijkartel! De noodzaak van referenda (Break the party cartel. The necessity of referendums). Amsterdam: Prometheus/Bert Bakker. ISBN 9789044633689
  • 2018: Van elk waarheen bevrijd (Delivered from all whereto. [Novel]). Amsterdam: Prometheus/Bert Bakker. ISBN 9789044637359
  • 2020: Politiek van het gezond verstand (Politics of common sense). Amsterdam: Amsterdam Books. ISBN 9789083063010
  • 2020: De ravage van tien jaar Rutte (The havoc of ten years' Rutte). Amsterdam: Amsterdam Books. ISBN 9789083063041

References

  1. ^ "Partij Forum voor Democratie". FvD. Retrieved 3 January 2021.
  2. ^ Peter Fasol. "De genealogie van Thierry Baudet". Nederlandse Genealogische Vereniging (in Dutch). Archived from the original on 13 July 2018. Retrieved 13 July 2018.
  3. ^ a b c Faber, Sebastiaan (5 April 2018). "Baudet the New Face of the European Alt-Right?". thenation.com.
  4. ^ a b c "Dr. T.H.Ph. (Thierry) Baudet" (in Dutch). Parlementair Documentatiecentrum (PDC), University of Leiden. 2 March 2016. Retrieved 1 March 2017.
  5. ^ Verdun, Amy (16 April 2019). "The Rise of Thierry Baudet - AIIA". Australian Institute of International Affairs. Archived from the original on 24 October 2020. Retrieved 2 April 2021.
  6. ^ Lotto Persio, Sofia (16 March 2017). "Why Dutch election results mean Geert Wilders lost, but populism hasn't". International Business Times. Archived from the original on 22 March 2017. Retrieved 2 April 2021.
  7. ^ "Baudet snapt ophef om 'homeopatische verdunning' niet - Dit is de Dag". NPO Radio 1.
  8. ^ Allochtoons (22 September 2017). "Thierry Baudet: "Ik wil graag dat Europa dominant blank, en cultureel blijft zoals het is."" – via YouTube.
  9. ^ "Ze delen weinig, behalve een diepe afkeer van Europa" (in Dutch). NRC Handelsblad. 7 March 2016. Retrieved 20 March 2016. dutch original "De belangrijkste vertegenwoordigers van de andere groep – bovenal een 'nee' – zijn het Burgercomité EU en Forum voor Democratie van opiniemaker Thierry Baudet."
    English translation: "The most important representatives of the other group, above all a no are the Civil Committee EU and the Forum for Democracy of opinion maker Thierry Baudet"
  10. ^ "OPEN BRIEF AAN TRUMP: 'Start nu objectief onderzoek naar MH17'". 23 January 2017. Archived from the original on 5 November 2021.
  11. ^ "Baudet vraagt Trump om nieuw onderzoek naar MH17, nabestaanden geschokt". de Volkskrant. 31 January 2017. Archived from the original on 23 June 2018.
  12. ^ "Baudet bekent kleur in MH17-debat". de Volkskrant. 31 May 2018. Archived from the original on 28 October 2020.
  13. ^ "WhatsApp leak exposes Russia link to Dutch far right". EUobserver. Retrieved 18 April 2020.
  14. ^ Bahara, Hassan (22 February 2022). "Tijdens eerste kennismaking met omroep Ongehoord Nederland klinkt radicaal-rechts volop door". volkskrant.nl/.
  15. ^ "Rutte: maximale sancties tegen Rusland • Oekraïners slaan op de vlucht". nos.nl/. 24 February 2022. Archived from the original on 24 February 2022.
  16. ^ "Rutte: Poetins agressie halt toeroepen • 'Tientallen doden in Charkov'". nos.nl/. 28 February 2022. Archived from the original on 28 February 2022.
  17. ^ Landman, Yuri (27 March 2017). "De Muzikale Dyslexie van Thierry Baudet". frnkfrt.net/.
  18. ^ Chaffin, Joshua (14 March 2017). "Populists seize the moment as Dutch fall out of love with EU". Financial Times.
  19. ^ (in Dutch) Thierry Baudet pleit voor herwaardering christendom, cip.nl, 15 February 2017
  20. ^ Slater, Tom (14 March 2017). "'The Dutch are sick of being lied to': Meet the man hoping to be kingmaker in the Dutch elections". Spiked.
  21. ^ Lanni, Alessandro (28 April 2019). "The Dandy Thierry Baudet and the new Dutch Populism. An Interview with Sarah de Lange". ResetDOC.
  22. ^ "Thierry Baudet: The new face of the euroskeptic Dutch right". Deutsche Welle.
  23. ^ "Baudet aangifte small en laster". De Telegraaf (in Dutch). 3 February 2018.
  24. ^ Vrijsen, Eric (9 February 2021). "Thierry Baudet: 'Je zus met een neger?'". ewmagazine.nl/.
  25. ^ "Elsevier Weekblad: Baudet verstuurde zelf ook racistische appjes". nos.nl/. 9 February 2021.
  26. ^ Boekestijn, Arend Jan (29 August 2017). "De term 'Cultureel Marxisme' leidt alleen maar tot verwarring" (in Dutch). NPO Radio 1. Retrieved 23 May 2019.
  27. ^ Breebaart, Leonie (1 May 2019). "Met cultuur-marxisme kun je alle kanten op". Trouw (in Dutch). Retrieved 23 May 2019.
  28. ^ Giesen, Peter (1 May 2019). "'Er is een complot tegen de Europese mens gaande'". de Volkskrant (in Dutch). Retrieved 23 May 2019.
  29. ^ "Skidmore College: Column: Force Fields". 24 November 2011. Archived from the original on 24 November 2011. Retrieved 23 March 2019.
  30. ^ Jackson, Paul; Shekhovtsov, Anton, eds. (17 October 2014). The post-war Anglo-American far right: a special relationship of hate. Basingstoke. ISBN 9781137396211. OCLC 890161379.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  31. ^ Copsey, Nigel; Richardson, John E., eds. (2015). Cultures of Post-War British Fascism. ISBN 9781138846838. OCLC 890758276.
  32. ^ "'Cultural Marxism' Catching On". Southern Poverty Law Center. Retrieved 23 March 2019.
  33. ^ Baudet, Thierry [@thierrybaudet] (20 August 2017). "Omdat de Europese Unie een cultuurmarxistisch project is dat tot doel heeft de vernietiging van de Europese beschaving. https://t.co/viDjPlokSR" (Tweet) (in Dutch). Archived from the original on 23 April 2018. Retrieved 23 March 2019 – via Twitter.
  34. ^ Complotdenken typeert Baudet beter dan antisemitisme, Volkskrant, 4 December 2020
  35. ^ "Thierry Baudet wins popular vote to stay on as leader of far right FvD". DutchNews.nl. 4 December 2020.
  36. ^ Markus, Niels (3 May 2021). "Baudets laatste provocatie leidt tot eensgezinde afkeer. 'Fouter dan fout'". trouw.nl/.
  37. ^ du Pré, Raoul (3 May 2021). "Baudet wekt massale verontwaardiging met 'bevrijdingsposter'". volkskrant.nl/.
  38. ^ Pfeijffer, Ilja Leonard (28 April 2021). "Thierry Baudet koestert wel degelijk nazistische sympathieën". hpdetijd.nl/.
  39. ^ "Invloed extreemrechts in Nederland groeit, kans op aanslag aannemelijk". joop.bnnvara.nl/. 29 April 2021.
  40. ^ De Witt Wijnen, Philip; Rutten, Rik (13 May 2021). "Thierry Baudet zorgt met zijn ophef en provocaties opnieuw voor een breuk in zijn partij". nrc.nl/.
  41. ^ "Halsema: Jodensterren bij coronaprotest dieptriest". nos.nl/. 6 September 2021.
  42. ^ Hensen, Chris (5 September 2021). "Afkeer tegen coronabeleid brengt betogers op de Dam bijeen, ondanks hun verschillen". nrc.nl/.
  43. ^ "Joodse organisaties: Kamer moet zich uitspreken tegen vergelijking Holocaust en corona". nos.nl/. 19 September 2021.
  44. ^ "Joodse organisaties: 'Nare smaak' door suggestie Baudet over 'claimen' WOII". nos.nl/. 23 September 2021.
  45. ^ van den Dool, Pim (22 September 2021). "Jetten (D66) eist excuses van Baudet om Holocaust-tweet". nrc.nl/.
  46. ^ "Rutte kritisch op 'onnadenkend' aanhalen Jodenvervolging door Baudet". nos.nl/. 23 September 2021.
  47. ^ "Dutch parliament returns from recess to debate Russia-Ukraine war". NL Times. 28 February 2022.
  48. ^ "Ex-Baudet colleague calls far-right leader "Manchurian candidate" for Putin support". NL Times. 27 February 2022.

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