Author: Lucie Sykorova, HlidaciPes.org, Czech Republic
The victory of the far-right populist, Eurosceptic and “friend of Russia” Geert Wilders in the Dutch parliamentary elections last November scared Europe. What is not talked about too much, however, is that Russia has a number of other strong supporters in the country that co-founded the EU.
These include the chairman of another parliamentary party, the FVD, Thierry Baudet, and Eva Vlaardingerbroek, a well-known activist and influencer who has been hard at work supporting farmer protests across Europe. Both of them are also promoting the so-called Nexit, i.e. the withdrawal of the Netherlands from the EU.
„I would like to be the new Farage,“ says Vlaardingerbroek, an activist and influencer. „People need to wake up and get out of the EU,“ she railed in a video interview with the GBNews channel last year. And this year, she’s even tougher: It’s time to tear down the Tower of Babel, she wrote on the X network in early February, alongside a picture of the burning European Parliament building.
Vlaardinerbroek studied law and philosophy and entered politics at the age of 20. She became a member of the Forum for Democracy party right after it was founded in 2017 and ran for the House of Representatives in 2021.
She also interrupted her studies for politics. „Eva realised that her calling was in the culture war, not academia,“ her LinkedIn profile said at the time.
One million followers on social media
But she eventually left the party before the election. Since then, she has worked as an activist and influencer on social media.
She is an increasingly influential voice on the international radical right scene, the Dutch daily NRC reports. She has a million followers on X and Instagram and is often a respected guest on alternative media and far-right events.
In particular, she has become a very vocal supporter of farmers’ protests, and not only in the Netherlands. She also went to the German farmers’ protests, even though they specifically asked her to stay at home because they did not want to be associated with the far right.
Nevertheless, in mid-January, Vlaardingerbroek stood wrapped in a Dutch flag on a German motorway to support German farmers and to inform the world about the farmers’ protests.
In 2021, she spent several months in Sweden as host of her own pan-European talk show, Let’s Talk About It, on the YouTube channel of the Swedish media outlet Riks, which is affiliated with the far-right Sverigedemokraterna party.
Now Vlaardingerbroek is gradually coming out more openly as part of the European Identity Movement. „I’m glad to be back on the scene,“ she said in an interview with Brittany Sellner in November 2022.
Sellner, whom Vlaardingerbroek calls her friend, is the wife of Martin Sellner, the leader of the Austrian Identitarians. The Sellner who, at a meeting with Germany’s far-right AfD party in Potsdam last January, reportedly proposed a master plan to deport millions of asylum seekers and Germans with a migration background.
The revelation of this led to mass demonstrations against the far right in Germany.
The young activist has repeatedly defended Russia and Vladimir Putin. She questions the portrayal of Russia as the aggressor in light of geopolitical events such as the conflict in Ukraine, and on social media she also admires Putin directly.
„Putin’s 30-minute narrative of Russian history was incredibly interesting, not only because of its contemporary political relevance, but especially because it directly highlights the fact that no Western leader today has been able to give such a detailed historical account of his own nation as Putin,“ she wrote, for example, this February on X.
Vlaardingerbroek also frequently praises Tucker Carlson, the former US Fox News anchor who attracted attention this February for his fawning interview with Vladimir Putin.
„Tucker is the best of the best in the business. He tells the truth in a way no one else can. I stand behind him 100%,“ she wrote on the X network a year ago, for example.
She has been a guest many times on Carlson’s talk show on Fox News. In 2022, for example, she said, referring to conspiracy theories, that the current crisis is being used to steal land from farmers so that immigrants can build houses on it.
In April 2023, Eva Vlaardingerbroek joined the Roman Catholic Church with her father and became a deeply religious woman with a divine mission. At her baptism she took the name Joan, after Joan of Arc, whose quote „I am not afraid, for God is with me. I was made for this,“ she quotes on her X profile.
„We are ruled by reptilians“
Thierry Baudet appeared in Dutch public space in 2016. Back then, he founded a think-tank called Forum for Democracy, with which he organised a referendum on the EU’s association agreement with Ukraine.
In that referendum, Dutch voters voted against the agreement by almost two to one.
Although the referendum was not binding, it meant that Prime Minister Mark Rutte had to seek assurances in Brussels that the agreement would not lead to automatic EU membership for Ukraine and would not commit member states to financially supporting the country.
In 2017, Baudet founded the political party Forum for Democracy (FVD) on the foundations of the think-tank.
„While we have no information about Wilders’ PVV’s ties to Russia, we know that Forum for Democracy has many contacts to Russia. There is also suspected funding from Russia,“ Sarah de Lange, a professor of political pluralism at the University of Amsterdam, told the website HlídacíPes.org.
The FVD party first participated in the 2017 elections and won two seats in the House of Representatives. After the 2018 municipal elections, it took three seats in the Amsterdam City Council.
The 2019 provincial elections brought the party 86 seats in twelve Dutch provinces, in three of which the FVD became the largest party.
Three FVD candidates made it to the European Parliament in 2019, but left the party a year later. In the 2021 parliamentary elections, the party campaigned against lockdown and measures related to the Covid-19 pandemic and managed to win eight members in the House of Representatives.
Baudet has never made a secret of his support for Russia. He strongly opposed EU sanctions against Russia after the occupation of Crimea in 2014.
The FVD party proposed normalisation of relations with Russia in its 2017 election programme and Baudet has repeatedly questioned the Dutch government’s criticism of Russia over the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in 2014.
In 2020, Baudet’s WhatsApp messages were leaked to the media, revealing his close contacts with Vladimir Kornilov, a Russian living in The Hague, Netherlands, who has ties to the Kremlin, according to a 2017 New York Times article.
Kornilov denies these ties, but regularly promotes pro-Kremlin narratives.
Vladimir Kornilov is a Russian with a Ukrainian passport, until 2013 he was the director of the Russian Institute of the CIS in Ukraine and had close contacts with separatists in Donbas.
He reportedly heads the Centre for Eurasian Studies in The Hague. He also writes regular commentaries for Ria Novosti. In 2017, he managed to get an interview on Dutch television, which presented him as an “expert”, the Volkskrant newspaper pointed out.
The Dutch investigative TV show Zembla reported that Thierry Baudet sent messages to a colleague before the 2016 referendum on the Ukraine deal, describing Kornilov as “a Russian who works for Putin”.
The messages also revealed that Baudet was apparently paid by Kornilov. The politician subsequently sought to refute this, presenting the debunked reports as a joke and exaggeration.
Since 2020, journalists and political analysts have described Baudet’s views as shifting from conservatism and nationalism to conspiracy theories, radicalism and, in some cases, neo-fascist and anti-Semitic views.
In a video from October 2022, Thierry Baudet already openly admits that he believes in conspiracy theories: „We are ruled by evil reptilians. The only one who can save us is the dark knight Vladimir Putin. Putin is a hero, I think he will win… And we must do everything we can to support him. He is fighting our fight…“
Expansion into Flanders
In 2022, the FVD regained representation in the European Parliament when former PVV senator Marcel de Graaff defected to the party.
He was originally a member of the Identity and Democracy group, but this faction also later expelled him because of disagreement with his stance on Russia. De Graaff was one of the 13 MEPs who voted against the condemnation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in March 2022.
Marcel De Graaff is set to lead the FVD’s candidate for this year’s Euro elections in Flanders, Belgium, where there is currently a growing vote for secession from Belgium. The FVD established a branch there in January this year. It will be able to take part in the elections here if it collects 5,000 signatures by 12 April.
It is still unclear whether the FVD will seek a rapprochement after the elections with Identity & Democracy, which expelled Marcel de Graaff two years ago.
Baudet wants to break through the “centrism” of the classical centre parties and to this end is also considering “a broad cooperation between the far left and the right”, the Niewsblad newspaper reports.
At the very first pre-election meeting in Genk, Flanders, Baudet called Russia Europe’s main ally, the newspaper reports.
He tried to convince the audience that the Flemish right-wing populist party Belang and the Dutch Wilders’ PVV are actually the same, are becoming part of the mainstream and are no longer radical enough. „Both parties support Israel and Ukraine and did not lift a finger during the coronavirus crisis.“
The European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) think-tank predicts that ten of the 31 Dutch MEPs could be in the Eurosceptic ID faction, making the Dutch group the third largest in that faction after France and Germany.
After the expulsion of Marcel de Graaff, there are currently no Dutch MEPs in this group.
