The Weekly Forum - 10 January
14 januari 2025 | Forum for Democracy Intl
FVD has not been on holiday during the holidays. At the end of December, a peace demonstration was held in Amsterdam to protest against the Ukraine war and the West’s continuing intervention in it. Two of FVD’s members of parliament attended, Gideon van Meijeren and Pepijn van Houwelingen. They were interviewed by a Dutch journalist and we have subtitled their answers. The questions were not low-lobs – and the answers were not simplistic. On the contrary ! Reality is more complex than moral condemnation and, as FVD has been saying for more than two years, wars are crises of which brute reality decides the outcome.
In the week which saw the death of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the veteran French nationalist leader, Elon Musk conducted an X-Space with the Chancellor candidate for the AfD, Alice Weidel. AfD is FVD’s sister party in the Europe of Sovereign Nations grouping based in the European Parliament. Musk has tweeted his support for the AfD and has expressed a desire to see the party win next month’s elections. Opinion polls have for some time now put the AfD in second place, above the governing Social Democrats. Of course it is to be expected that the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats and Greens will again create a cordon sanitaire to prevent the AfD from taking power, as the equivalent parties have done for decades in France against the Front National (now ‘Rassemblement National’). On the other hand, this policy has just collapsed in neighbouring Austria. Margreet Booij, a journalist for the Dutch language paper ‘Common Sense’ (Gezond Verstand) has explained the situation in an exclusive article for FVD.
Read Margreet Booij’s article here
Indeed, the demonisation of the Right has lost none of its force. Just as Stern magazine in Germany this week has equated Elon Musk with Vladimir Putin in their supposed combined ‘attack on our democracy’ – FVD thinks it is the current political system which stifles democracy - so Jean-Marie Le Pen’s surprise victory in the first round of the 2002 presidential election in France seemed to be an earthquake at the time. Le Pen died this week, nearly 23 years later, but his name continues to stir controversy: hoodlums let off fireworks in Paris in celebration at his death. Back in 2002, John Laughland was the only international journalist to get access to Le Pen between the two rounds of the election. FVD is this week re-printing the article he published then (commissioned by the then editor of The Spectator, Boris Johnson…) largely to emphasise that the Hitlerisation of political debate is at least a quarter of a century old. It shows no sign of ageing, unfortunately.
Read John Laughland’s article here
On 16 January, FVD’s Renaissance Institute in Amsterdam is hosting a lecture in English on the Milei revolution in Argentina. If you are in Amsterdam or nearby, please come!