The Weekly Forum - 16 January 2026
20 januari 2026 | Forum for Democracy Intl
Every week hundreds of illegal migrants cross the English channel in inflatable dinghies. Even though they are breaking the law and are transported by criminal gangs, when they arrive they are politely escorted by police, lodged in hotels and given allowances until their asylum applications are processed. This scandal has been going on for decades – at least since the creation of the border-free Schengen zone in the mid-1990s. But when the Dutch political influencer, Eva Vlaadingerbroek, wanted to travel to the UK this week, she was refused entry. She had recently published an X-post critical of the UK prime minister, so she appears to be a victim of the same totalitarian mentality which has imprisoned British citizens for inappropriate tweets and sanctioned European citizens in the EU. But this is not the first time Britain has refused entry to a Dutch conservative: in 2009, the prominent national politician Geert Wilders was turned back at Heathrow airport, even though he had been invited by members of the House of Lords to give a private showing of a film he made about Islam. FVD parliamentary party chair, Lidewij de Vos, has put down questions to the Dutch government about the implications for free speech of such treatment of Dutch nationals by one of its most important neighbours.
Read about Lidewij’s questions here
The decision about Eva was taken in the name of the (undefined) ‘public good’ and it cannot be appealed. This is an example of the ever greater retreat of the rule of law, as the sanctions against Jacques Baud and Xavier Moreau have also shown. (These sanctions, which we discussed this week on The Forum & Friends, include travel bans, just as against Eva). But the same is happening at the international level too. Power politics has returned with a vengeance under Donald Trump, with the spectacular Venezuela operation to seize Nicolas Maduro and the demands on Greenland. But was it not ever thus? We have known since the Peloponnesian war that the strong will do what they can while the weak will suffer what they must. Ralf Dekker described international law – on which the EU and NATO have staked their entire reputation for decades – as little but a ‘castle in the air’. As the so-called ‘international order’ (did it ever exist?) is exposed as an illusion, we are reminded of Prospero’s speech in ‘The Tempest’: ‘like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind.’
Read Ralf Dekker’s speech in parliament here
Thierry Baudet has announced that he is temporarily leaving Parliament and that he will be replaced by Tom Russcher. Thierry has been an MP since 2017, the year after FVD was founded. Shortly before announcing his decision, Thierry republished a long post from 2024 in which he expresses his utter amazement at the conformism of political and intellectual life in Europe today. ‘The Closing of the American Mind’ was published in 1987 but we can safely say that the European mind has closed very severely, especially in the last decade. It is absolutely essential to break out of this ever tightening straitjacket or else we will have no collective mind left to open.
The most obvious illustration of this closing is the attack on free speech, of which the sanctions against European citizens for wrongthink is the latest terrifying example. We discussed this on The Forum this week with Roger Köppel, former Swiss member of parliament and now owner of a major media outlet, Weltwoche.