The Weekly Forum - 12 February 2026
16 februari 2026 | Forum for Democracy Intl
Following its stunning electoral success last October – from 3 seats in Parliament to 7 – FVD now stands at 13 or 14 seats in the opinion polls. With this astonishing momentum, FVD is putting up candidates in 104 municipalities for the local elections in March. The politico-media establishment has pressed the panic button, alleging, obsessively, with the aid of grotesque dehumanising cartoons, and on the basis of WhatsApp messages gleaned God knows how from nearly 10 years ago, that the party is full of Nazis. Nothing new about that – the trick was tried in 2021 and caused a split in the party back then. The only surprising thing is that the same establishment has been turning a blind eye to real Nazis in Ukraine for four years now. Parliamentary party leader Lidewij de Vos addressed these attacks in a superb to-camera speech, which we have translated with AI. She really is formidable.
FVD International’s Director, John Laughland, was again interviewed on the Australian TV channel The World Today last week. He addressed the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee’s report on censorship in the EU. As John knows because he used to lecture in Paris on ‘democracy and the media’ (until the lectures were stopped because the students protested that he was criticising NATO!) a huge censorship-industrial complex was built up on the initiative of the USA following the first Trump election in 2016 and the Brexit vote of that year. ‘The Revolt of the Elites’ (Christopher Lasch foresaw it all in 1995) ensued and billions were spent policing anti-establishment speech. It is no doubt good that the US Congress is getting its teeth into the matter and would be even better if European parliaments would do the same – and if the US Congress also examined what has been done in the US itself.
John was also interviewed by the French politician François Asselineau on the official channel of his Union Populaire Républicaine party. Asselineau is the only French politician to have consistently called for France to leave the EU, the euro and NATO, for the last 18 years and more. Their conversation ranged over a wide range of issues, from the Epstein files, the rise of Reform UK and the Sovietisation of Europe to the war in Ukraine.
Watch John’s interview here (in French)
In November last year, Thierry Baudet, Peter van Duijvenvoorde and John Laughland were honoured to be invited to an international meeting in Vienna and in Schloss Artstetten in Lower Austria. Artstetten is the seat of the Hohenberg dynasty, created when the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, married Countess Sophie Chotek. The couple were famously assassinated in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, triggering the First World War. Their great-grandson, Prince Leo von Hohenberg, welcomed the guests and delivered a magnificent speech on the dangers of globalism. The assassination is one of the greatest illustrations that history is never inevitable – it might not have happened and it might have not succeeded. Globalism, by contrast, is a solidly established series of policy choices which unfortunately owe nothing to chance and which must be decisively destroyed.
Watch Prince Leo von Hohenberg’s speech here
Tarik Cyril Amar from Koç University in Istanbul and Stevan Gajic from the Institute of European Studies in Belgrade were our guests on The Forum this week, discussing EU censorship (a big subject). If you missed it, watch back here.