Dr. Simone Kerseboom is a member of the Dutch Parliament for the Forum for Democracy Party [FvD]. Although she was born in the Netherlands, she spent much of her life in South Africa, where she studied and earned a Ph.D. in history. The European Conservative caught up with her at CPAC Hungary to discuss her party’s image in the international press, how her experience in South Africa has shaped her view of the world, what comparisons can be drawn between the Netherlands and South Africa, and what it is like being a mother and a lawmaker.
As a member of the Dutch parliament who has spent nearly half of your life in South Africa, can you tell us how your experiences in S.A. have informed your politics and worldview and what, if anything, can Europeans learn from the lamentable socio-political situation that has arisen in South Africa?
I was born in the Netherlands, to a South African mother and a Dutch father. When I was twelve years old my family immigrated to South Africa, and it was there where I attended high school and later university. As many may already be aware of, South Africa is an exceedingly complex nation-state, and in many ways, the establishment of the Union of South Africa, the historical predecessor to the present-day Republic of South Africa, in 1910, was the first large-scale globalist experiment. At the time, British imperialists decided that the piece of land—despite its extraordinary vastness, which encompasses exceptional ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and religious diversity—should be one country.
This globalist concept, when everything is taken into account, simply does not work. When you have a country that is as ethnically, religiously, linguistically, and culturally diverse as South Africa, everybody has a different idea of what it means to be South African, and the end result is this: the people, instead of working together as countrymen and women ought to, end up working against each other.
So, when I moved back to the Netherlands, I immediately saw the parallels between what was happening here and South Africa. I was reminded of the EU, the idea of an ever-closer union and its forceful imposition on the people, and the globalist notion that the 27 member states—despite having disparate interests along with unique languages, cultures, traditions, and ethnicities—should be under the rule of a unitary state.
Shortly after I moved back to the Netherlands I realized that, unlike in South Africa where broad swaths of the population are obliged to be autarchic due to the absence and incompetence of the state, large portions of the Dutch population are dependent upon the government, and as a result have lost the ability to take care of themselves.
Of course, this, the idea that people should be self-reliant and able to self-govern, is one of the core tenets of conservatism today. And this, as has become increasingly evident, is something that has been and continues to be taken away, as the EU upholds the idea that the state should take care of people from the cradle to the grave. And for me, I just saw all these parallels between South Africa, the Netherlands, and more broadly the European Union. It behooves European conservatives to take an interest in South Africa since it’s a place where a great many of the distressing things we see taking place across the EU have already happened. There is much to be gleaned from paying attention to what’s going on in South Africa and what has already taken place there.
Tell us about your foray into politics, would you?
Somebody gave me the book of our party leader, Thierry Baudet, The Significance of Borders. The book’s thesis posited that in order for a given people to have the chance to continue their existence, the nation-state must exist. And for me, this was the way—the very informative way—in which I first came into contact with the Forum for Democracy (FvD). So, I voted for them during the elections in 2017.
Was this the year the FvD took the county’s political establishment by surprise and burst onto the parliamentary stage?
Absolutely, yes. First, during the national legislative election of 2017, we won two seats in the House of Representatives, the lower house in the Netherlands’ bicameral parliament. Then, of course, provincial elections came in 2019, and that’s when we became the largest party in the Netherlands. I was on the party list of candidates in this election.
What do you attribute your party’s meteoric rise to?
I think, essentially, it was that we represented a new sound in the Netherlands that the people needed to hear. We were the only party that vehemently resisted this climate change policy that the Rutte government sought to impose on the people’s lives in a very dictatorial way, which resulted in a noticeable uptick in the working and middle classes’ cost of living. Of course, it was the anti-climate policy that was our big theme for the 2019 elections. And of course, also our staunch resistance to that multicultural agenda, to immigration, and to everything being imposed upon us from the EU. During the run-up to the election, the root of each issue being discussed went back to “Oh no, but this is all being done by the EU, we can’t make our own rules!’ and the people were clearly tired of hearing this.
So, what happened in this last election? The FvD lost a great deal of its supporters. Did they just not show up? Did they cast their votes for the new farmers’ party, the BBB?
It is actually very interesting you mentioned that. A study was done shortly after the elections and it looked at how different voters transitioned to different parties and how they changed their votes from elections in 2019 and 2023, and it showed that 40% of our voters did not vote in these elections and that is a massively high number of voters to lose. But it is also because people have lost trust. People no longer trust the whole political process, they don’t have faith in the idea that parliamentary democracy and politics can affect any change. At this point, the best the FvD can do is to point out the fact that our globalist government constantly seeks to blame its failures on the EU, saying: “We can’t change anything, this is what is happening in Brussels…” And people are tired… There’s still great fatigue because of the pandemic. The COVID policies imposed by the Dutch state were very dictatorial and people, as a result, lost trust in the government.
People are moving away from what is established, and it seems that they are moving toward a position that says: just leave me alone, I want to be left alone, I’m no longer voting, it doesn’t make a difference anyway. And it is sad, it is tragic. However, it is up to us, eventually, to reinstate their faith in politics.
How do you plan to restore the people’s faith in politics?
We have to continue bringing the message in the way that we have previously done. What FvD is well-known for is that quite early, we were saying things that might sound very provocative at the time. I noticed it at this conference as well … at CPAC last year people were too afraid to use the word ‘globalists’, and this year—it is happening. Without a doubt, I see our party as the vanguard of the right-wing anti-globalist movement, as a kind of trendsetter. For example, we often mention something which at the time is too provocative for people and they go “Oh it’s all conspiracy,” yeah? Eventually, what we say, however, is usually revealed to have been true. I think it is very important to stick to your principles; instead of being populist, you need to stick to your principles and keep telling the truth, and eventually, because of this, people begin to regain faith in politics and in political parties.
What separates the FvD from most of the other parties that claim to be anti-establishment, anti-globalist, national-conservative, or populist is this: we are recognizing trends now, we are going to talk about it, it might seem very strange to most people now, but we promise you in a year you are going to find out we were right.
The international mainstream press and the liberal press in the Netherlands have attempted to paint the FvD as an extremist party that promotes ‘conspiracy theories’ and poses a threat to democracy. As one of the FvD’s top lawmakers, how do you respond to such accusations, and how do you yourself view the party?
Regarding the attempts by the mainstream globalist press to smear our party in such a way, personally, I think it is no longer valuable to use energy to try and respond to these attacks. The reason we are described in this way is because a) this is the easiest way to discredit people and parties like FvD, and b) this is what the progressive Left wants us to be. Regardless of what they say, however, most of our party’s positions reflect that which is held by the majority of our countrymen and women.
In truth, the FvD is a conservative party that seeks to protect Dutch values, traditions, and family. It should be known that our enemies employ the same or similar language to slander other conservative parties across the globe. Interestingly, in one of the speeches delivered yesterday, someone said that we mustn’t believe the lies our enemies are telling us about our friends. And I think that is such an essential message in the conservative world. You have this idea that “uhh, but that party is too extreme!” But we are not extreme at all. We simply tell the truth, no matter how politically inconvenient it may be, and we stick to traditions and our values.
Unfortunately, many people hear these things, and they automatically just believe what they hear. But then, at the same time, sometimes the attacks are so heavy-handed that they actually have the opposite effect. People see how over-the-top many of the attacks on our party are. For example, some people will listen to a parliamentary address by Thierry Baudet and say, “Actually, yeah, your ideas are actually quite normal,’ and this doesn’t support, in fact, it goes against what we are reading in the media, or seeing on the state television.
Despite being consistently pro-Israel, FvD has faced accusations of antisemitism. Can you respond to these accusations?
Ah, that exhausting frame again. It is, of course, utter nonsense. This question reinforces what I said about the problems in our Conservative bubble: we do believe the lies our enemies tell us about our friends. Anti-semitism is the first frame the progressive left and mainstream media use to disqualify anyone who opposes their dominant ideology. After that you’re a racist, Nazi, fascist, or even worse.
We live in a world where being critical of George Soros makes you an anti-semite. If that’s the case, everyone here at CPAC is an anti-semite. So you can see how ridiculous that is. So let’s not waste our energy on these frames. Listen to what we are saying, not to what the mainstream media is saying about us. And if you can find anything anti-semitic in our speeches in Parliament, you can ask me again.
Finally, for our young female readers who are thinking about going into politics but who would like to start a family as well, tell us, what is it like being a mother and a lawmaker. How do you balance the two?
Well, I’m very lucky of course. We have a strong family structure, so there is always somebody to look after the baby when I’m busy doing my work in the Hague. But I see having a child as complementary to my work as a lawmaker as well. Because I believe once you have a child, your experience and your view of the world changes. I now have a much better understanding of world leaders who don’t have children … why they are acting against the interests of their own people, and why there is no vision for the future. It is because they don’t have a future that they want to secure. After having a child, you all of a sudden realize it is up to you as a parent to ensure that your child has a home, or a country, or a nation to form a home, that your child has a family that she can always rely on. And then the passion and drive to protect that becomes so strong. Lastly, if you are in the privileged position of being a member of parliament, where you can vocalize and act on that feeling, as a mother, I think it is one of the most wonderful things that can actually happen to a mother.
