The Weekly Forum - 19 September
20 september 2024 | Forum for Democracy Intl
This week, FVD put itself at the centre of the new pan-European political party, Europe of Sovereign Nations, when it hosted numerous foreign guests at a meeting of all FVD’s elected officials in the grounds of a stately home in Gelderland on 15 September. We were honoured to have representatives from France (Eric Zemmour, the leader of Reconquête, and Sarah Knafo MEP), Germany (Irmhild Bossdorf, MEP for Alternative für Deutschland) and Bulgaria (Stanislav Stoyanov and Rada Laykova from Vazrazhdane / Revival). We thereby covered not just the Franco-German core of Europe but also spanned East and West, bringing the most South-Easterly member state on the European continent to the most North-Westerly. FVD hopes to play a central role in the new party and its activities. In his speech to the several hundred guests, Thierry Baudet emphasised the need for a European Europe – a phrase Sarah Knafo also used later in her own speech – free from American political and cultural domination.
Read about the Brakel event here
FVD’s international activity also continued in Budapest last week, where FVD MP Pepijn van Houwelingen attended a session of the International Parliamentarians Congress in the magnificent Hungarian parliament. He was the only member of the Dutch parliament to do so, the others having decided to boycott the conference … because it was held in Hungary!
Pepijn used the occasion to meet colleagues from our sister parties Mi Hazank (Our Homeland) in Hungary and Vazrazhdane in Bulgaria. (The Bulgarian MP made a good speech about the need for peace in Ukraine.). Pepijn spoke about the need for strict controls on immigration and thanked Hungary for serving as a model to the rest of Europe. A week later, the European Commission imposed a €200 million fine on Hungary for refusing to obey its asylum and immigration rules: European democracy in action.
Watch Pepijn's speech in Hungarian Parliament here
And now the EU has done the same thing to the Netherlands! The new PVV-led government wrote to Brussels to ask for an exemption from the EU’s asylum policy, there being a long commitment to substantial reform of immigration policy in the Schoof government’s coalition agreement - and the EU rejected its request. This naturally put Geert Wilders in a very embarrassing position, especially since – as Thierry Baudet got him to admit during questions in Parliament – it turns out that his party had quietly dropped its commitment to Nexit before this year’s European Parliament elections, having won the elections on a pro-Nexit platform last November and having campaigned against the EU and the euro for years. This leaves FVD the only party in the Netherlands – the country which is the biggest per capita net contributor to the EU budget – in favour of leaving the organisation which prevents national governments implementing the policies for which they were elected. Take back control!
Read about FVD as the only Nexit party here
We held a special emergency edition of The Forum on the exploding pagers and walkie-talkies in Lebanon on Wednesday. The superb Middle East experts, Kevork Almassian and Vanessa Beeley, were very kind to join us at short notice. If you missed it, you can listen back by clicking below.
Watch the Forum & Friends here
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John Laughland,
Director FVD International