The Weekly Forum - 3 November 2025

Forum for Democracy had a fabulous result in the parliamentary elections held on 29 October – 7 seats, up from 3 in the previous parliament. This more than doubling of our score is a source of great joy and  the trajectory is hugely encouraging, testimony (we hope) to the intellectual rigour of our party and to its exceptional esprit de corps.

FVD is a radical party – from radix in Latin, the root. We try to go to the root of problems. Asked about a future government coalition, FVD lead candidate Lidewij de Vos came up with a radical proposal: let’s forget about the shady world of coalition building, in which party grandees horse-trade parts of their manifesto for months on end in order to get control of this or that ministry and then exclude the rest of the Members of Parliament as ‘the opposition’. Let us instead have neutral (technocratic) ministers with policy choices made by Parliament on a case by case basis. According to this plan, the government would implement decisions taken in Parliament or by referendum, instead of the current arrangement where a shaky coalition takes all the decisions until it collapses.

Now, there’s a novel plan!

Watch Lidewij’s interview here

Academic freedom, like free speech, is in need of permanent defence.  Unfortunately the battle is currently not going well. The ‘liberal fascists’ (Jonah Goldberg) are waging a largely successful war against ‘disinformation’ – their favourite go-to phrase to condemn or ban any view with which they disagree. Emmanuel Macron in France is vowing to ‘take control’ of social media - an explicitly anti-democratic project. This is surely because generations have been educated to think this way. As Thomas Fazi has recently shown in a magnificent report for MCC Brussels, the EU spends tens of millions of euros supporting EU propaganda in universities through the Jean Monnet programme. As he shows, these so-called academics are in fact pushing an explicitly pro-EU agenda and therefore structuring the minds of young people to believe unquestioningly in the EU project.

Read Thomas Fazi’s article here

We conclude our mini-series of interviews conducted by Marco van den Boomgard on a recent trip to Croatia with a conversation with Stephen Bartulica MEP, a Croatian nationalist and Christian politician who shares many of FVD’s views on traditional values and the EU. Bartulica grew up in the USA and therefore promotes both social conservatism and limited government, his perfect English bringing a clear and unaccented breath of Central European values into the European Parliament, the very temple of their emphatic rejection. 

Watch Marco’s interview with Stephen Bartulica here

It is very difficult to be objective and analytical about the Middle East, especially when you are from the region, but Ali Rizk achieves the remarkable feat of being both these and also astonishingly lucid. We were honoured to have him as our guest on The Forum this week. He was fascinating. If you missed it, listen back.

Listen to The Forum here