The Weekly Forum - 26 February 2026
03 maart 2026 | Forum for Democracy Intl
If you receive money from the Dutch government, for instance a subsidy or a grant, the accounting oversight is so extensive that it costs you about 20% of the sum given. But where government spending is concerned, tens of millions can be wasted because of bureaucratic dysfunction. A bureaucratic mechanism was put in place to ensure that asylum applications are dealt with quickly: if they are not, a penalty is paid to the applicant. The goal was to incentivise government efficiency; the result is spectacular waste. It has been discovered that €36 million were paid out in 2024, €37,500 per asylum seeker. The more the procedure is delayed, the more money the asylum seeker gets – in some cases nearly a year’s salary. This is literally madness – or rather, a racket. It took FVD and its parliamentary leader, Lidewij de Vos, to find this out and to demand answers from the government.
Read Lidewij’s questions to the government here
FVD International’s director, John Laughland, was a guest again last week on Mike Ryan’s The Protagonists on The World Today based in Australia, this time to discuss the censorship mechanisms within the EU. As John explained, there are currently two major censorship mechanisms in place – the sanctions regime for ‘disinformation’, recently deployed against two European citizens, and the Digital Services Act which recently imposed a €120 million fine on X – and two more in the pipeline.The ‘European Democracy Shield’ (don’t laugh!) is being put into operation even now, while at national level several states (France and Spain, to start with) intend to restrict access to social networks to people over 15 – which means that everyone will have to prove their identity even to access them. This is surely the very definition of a police state.
Watch John Laughland on The World Today here
John also cranked out his rather rusty Italian to speak to Giacomo Gabellini on his podcast, Il Contesto. They discussed the increasing totalitarianism of the West, especially Europe, where control of the narrative has become the principal obsession of governments, which are increasingly dominated by ideology.
We are delighted and honoured to republish a recent research piece by Cyan Quinn of the White Papers Institute. Cyan, who has been our guest on The Forum, and who is as charming as she is intelligent, argues that the truth about the Great Replacement is being hidden by faulty statistics. Some countries practise ‘colour blind’ censuses, France and Italy for instance, others include race and ethnicity in both censuses and police reports. How you define ‘an Italian’ or ‘a Dutchman’ varies from country to country according to legislation. Cyan is convinced that the overall effect of these various methods is to hide the extent to which the native populations of Europe are being replaced by immigrants.
Read Cyan Quinn’s article here
Scott from China was our guest on The Forum this week, to discuss how de-centralised China is. Both in terms of state structures and of the economy, power is far more dispersed, to the provinces and to private individuals, than it is in the economically and politically centralised West. The Chinese state spends only a fraction at national level what the US and European states do: the rest is spent by the provinces and localities. The same goes for the economy, where the state is effectively absent – from AI, for instance, but also from infrastructure projects like railways! De-centralisation produces competition and prosperity: this is why China is steaming ahead while Europe languishes in stagnation.