Frederik “Freek” Jansen is a member of parliament for the Forum for Democracy (FvD), a fast-growing Dutch conservative party led by the charismatic Thierry Baudet. Jansen has been involved in FvD ever since it became a party in 2016 and is also the chair of its highly active youth wing.
We met Jensen in the FvD offices in the parliament, just as the staff was preparing for the final push at the last round of debates on Tuesday night. Baudet was also there—despite being hospitalized after being assaulted the night before—full of energy and ready for the action.
The FvD is currently polling at five seats, but that might be misleading as the party’s true support was never easy to gauge, precisely because of its highly unique character in the Dutch political scene. Considering their huge support among the youth, the FvD believes it’s only a matter of time before the Netherlands abandons the old establishment and shifts profoundly to the Right.
Last evening, your party leader, Thierry Baudet, was attacked for the second time in under a month. What’s going on here?
Yes, Baudet was attacked again yesterday by someone in a bar where we had an event. And it was just a 15-year-old kid. He pretended to want to take a picture with Thierry, and then he hit him in the face with a beer bottle multiple times. And it just missed his eye, which could’ve blinded him, or hit his temple, which would have been even worse. So he’s very lucky, but it was a very shocking event.
The kid was arrested and is going to be prosecuted—it’s attempted murder, in my view. And it wasn’t just committed by some random kid, he was part of the Antifa movement, and the organization has actually claimed responsibility for the attack later. We think that Antifa should be placed on the terrorist organizations’ list, and we will try to achieve that as soon as possible. We’ve spoken to the prime minister about it and the Ministry of Justice is looking into the possibilities.
It seems that, in the Netherlands, there is a tradition of violence against political figures on the Right.
In the Netherlands, we’ve had a number of political attacks, and they’ve always been against right-wing politicians or opinion makers. It always comes from the Left. We’ve had the fatal attack on Pim Fortuyn, who was shot to death in 2002. Two years later, Theo van Gogh was stabbed to death, he was a notable critic of Islam. And then you have PVV leader Geert Wilders, who has been placed under state protection for the last 20 years or so because there are so many threats against him.
We, the FvD, have been attacked many times in the past. Just a month ago, Thierry was attacked physically in Ghent, Belgium. But his house has also been attacked multiple times. Our party office has been attacked by Antifa, with the police next to them not doing anything. Last year, we had to endure so many things. Me personally as well. There have been many, many instances of violence against right-wing parties in the Netherlands, always coming from the extreme Left, and there’s never really been any action against it.
Wilders’ protection is financed by the state?
Yes, he is under state protection. But it’s not a life that you would want. It’s terrible, you lose your entire freedom. You move from safe house to safe house. Always six bodyguards around you. You can’t go anywhere, really. So it’s not something that you want in any case, and I hope it will not be necessary for us.
FvD has distinguished itself with a unique social media presence. Does that help you reach the young generation more easily? You’re also the chairman of the party’s youth wing, how do you counter today’s leftist indoctrination among the youth?
There’s been a media boycott against our party for the last three years. Thierry hasn’t been allowed on television, for example, talk shows, there haven’t been any newspaper interviews either. There’s a complete and total media blackout about us. So the only way we can actually reach anyone is through social media. And they’ve tried to take that away, as well, of course, with shadow bans and that sort of stuff. Specifically on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube for a time. Apparently, we’re starting to see them lifting the shadow ban now. Of course, we have X now, formerly Twitter, which is much more open. And then there’s TikTok, which is entirely open. It’s not a censored platform in the way the rest is. There are community guidelines, but they don’t do shadow banning. On TikTok, we organically reach millions of people per video, and that immediately shows our party’s real popularity. Before they began actively censoring us, we used to get those views on all our platforms.
What we’ve seen in this election is that the youth, specifically, has been very attracted to us. On the one hand, you’re right, the youth is the future and our message is aimed at the future so it resonates with younger generations. But also, we are reaching many people in general. Our message resonates with anyone who hears it. The older generations, however, aren’t allowed to hear it, because the mainstream media is filtering it for them. So it’s not about specifically aiming at the youth, because it resonates with everyone, it’s just that the youth are the only ones able to hear it.
Is it possible the polls are understating your true support because they don’t survey those with whom you are most popular?
Yes, this is definitely a possibility. The polls have always put us lower than we actually were. For example, in the last election, we got eight seats in parliament, and they polled us at five. And they’ve always been slightly off. So it’s very much possible that tomorrow we’ll be getting more seats than the polling is saying right now. We are again predicted to win five seats, but we may even reach eight. We’ll have to see. But it’s true, the young are a very difficult group to target in a poll. The youth typically don’t sign up for these things.
There is a lot of chatter about strategic voting. Wilders’ PVV is high in the polls and people want it to take part in a right-wing coalition. Is this a concern for the FvD?
Look, I don’t believe in strategic voting. I once did it myself in 2012. The Liberal Party (VVD) and the Labor Party (PvdA) were both up in the polls, just like now. And they said vote for us, because otherwise we’ll get a left-wing government or vote for us or we would get a right-wing government. And then after the election, the two of them formed a coalition government together. So I don’t believe that strategic voting will ever work, you’ll be screwed anyway. You might as well just vote for the party that you actually believe in. And that is our message to the people who might want to switch. I don’t think they are likely to. There have been specific polls about this. There’s only a slight margin of our supporters who are even considering voting for a different party than ours, especially on strategic grounds. Those percentages are much higher for the other parties, but we have a very solid base.
What makes FvD stand out in the Dutch political scene, especially compared to other right-wing and conservative parties?
In general, I believe that we are fundamentally different from every other party that is currently in Dutch politics, because we have a fundamentally different worldview. One, we don’t believe that parliamentary politics is the only way to societal change. We believe that societal change is also cultural, that’s why we have all sorts of institutions. We believe that we need to be economically active. Economics changes culture, culture changes politics, there’s all these multiple factors behind history, and we believe that we have to be active and all those different spheres, and that fundamentally sets us apart from all the other parties.
But also in terms of ideology. You have NSC, BBB, JA21 … they are new parties, but they believe the same things as the old ones and vote more or less the same. Sometimes they are more critical in one area, and then they’re no longer critical in the other. For example, they all believe in climate change and that it’s important to do all these countermeasures. They all believe more or less the same that the European Union should exist, and that it’s important for Europe to become one. With the exception of JA21, they all believe in immigration. I don’t think many voters realize this, but Omtzigt’s NSC is very much in favor of immigration, it’s always voted in favor of more immigrants. Same goes for the BBB, the Farmers’ Party, very much in favor of immigration. And it will continue when these parties take over their former parties that split off. It’s the same people with a different brand name.
And the same goes for all sorts of parties here in the Netherlands, they have the same worldview. They’re ultimately all “Enlightenment parties,” they believe in the values of the Enlightenment. And that’s why they all arrive at the same conclusions. A specific example of this is the woke or the LGBT stuff. So all of these parties, with no exception, believe that children should be exposed to LGBT propaganda. We are the only party here in the Netherlands that has spoken out against that, including the PVV. They are in favor of all that.
So this is more than a political fight for you. You don’t fight the other parties, you fight the system that incorporates all of them to a certain degree.
Yes, it’s definitely much more than just a political battle. It’s a culture war. It’s an information war—that’s why they say we’re spreading disinformation—and also a spiritual war. Ultimately, it’s a fight between good and evil. We believe in a very different future for humanity. And we see that where we’re heading right now is a place where people are going to be very unhappy. It doesn’t fit with human nature. And that is something that, like I said, sets us apart from the others, who don’t think about any of this.
Omtzigt might easily end up in a kingmaker position, but he already excluded the PVV and the FvD from any coalition. What do you think will happen?
It’s very difficult to say, this is all speculative. In only a few days, PVV went up to be the number one in the polls, while Omtzigt’s NSC has been going down. On the other hand, in the last election, PVV was polled five seats too high. They were polled 24, I think, then they got 19. If that’s the case right now, then they won’t be the biggest party. It might be NSC or it might be VVD too. So it’s very difficult to say right now. It will all come down to the actual votes, the only real poll.
But I fear that VVD is going to win, and they have no principles at all. They will do anything to stay in power. They will just form a coalition with Timmermans and his labor-green alliance. They will raise taxes, continue with immigration, continue with the climate stuff … They will do whatever they need to stay in power.
VVD is the ultimate establishment party and has been in power for 14 years. How does it still continue to enjoy such support?
That’s the golden question. Why does the VVD still get votes? It’s very obvious to me that nearly everything is going wrong in the Netherlands, especially for the past decade. For a lot of people, that’s obvious too, but there’s a large group of Dutch people that are simply not affected by it. They live in their own neighborhoods and withdraw from the effects of immigration. They don’t like the taxes going up, but they see it like a sort of law of nature that things would always go this way. It’s a very apathetic group who just don’t seem to care. Completely tuned out of politics.
And then in election times, they get all these promises and all that, and then they believe them, because why would people lie to them? They do lie. And they never do what they promise. I think it’s a psychological defense mechanism for people to not really look at it, and just go and vote for the government in the end.
VVD doesn’t have an active base. They have less than 20,000 members. We have 60,000. That’s huge. For example, AfD has 30,000 members in Germany, out of 80 million. We have 60,000 out of 17 million, quite a difference. And I think, also, our popularity among the youth is an indicator of a very fundamental political change that’s going to happen in this country.
If polls miss them, how do you measure support among the youth?
We have the “school elections” today, actually, we’re waiting for the results to be published right now. The youth that are not old enough to vote yet can still vote in their schools, a day before the election, and then you can see what the youth believes. The Green-Left party is always very popular because of all this indoctrination about climate change. But we are also very popular, despite schools and teachers actively speaking against us in their classes. The youth is very much in favor of Forum for Democracy, I think we’re going to be second or third in this election.
And I think that all of the negative consequences of the policies in the last decade are going to affect the youth the most. They will have to live with the consequences of what their parents voted for. On a very deep level, they know this and they know that we stand for change, for real change. We are so fundamentally different from all those parties, and the youth feel this, and that’s why they’re going to vote for us. A right-wing Netherlands is only a matter of time.
Note: Jansen was right. The results coming in after the interview put PVV in first place with nearly 16%, followed by FvD in close second with over 13%. The Green-Labor alliance finished only fourth, after the governing VVD.
