The Weekly Forum - 6 June
10 juni 2025 | Forum for Democracy Intl
FVD is not happy that Geert Wilders took his party out of the coalition this week, thereby causing the government to collapse. This has wasted a rare opportunity. For the first time, a more or less right-wing government could have started to tackle immigration. It did nothing. 130,000 immigrants settled in the Netherlands in 2024 alone. This is more than the population of the city of Maastricht.
Thierry Baudet has deplored Geert Wilders’ decision – and also speculated in Parliament that the collapse of the government had nothing to do with immigration, but that instead it was because of Israel. Members of the coalition, the Foreign Minister in particular, have turned against Israel over Gaza and initiated an EU inquest into the war. Geert Wilders, by contrast, is known for his unconditional support not only for Israel in general but for Benjamin Netanyahu in particular.
Thierry has claimed this because it is not credible to say that measures could not be taken against immigration: the whole coalition was in agreement on this matter, and yet nothing was done. Why not?
Whatever happens, it now means that a ‘caretaker’ government will take major decisions about Ukraine at the NATO summit in The Hague in late June - just as a ‘caretaker’ government decided to give F-16 fighter planes to Ukraine back in August 2023.
Is NATO the secret government of the Netherlands and of its other member states, imposing obligations which parliaments and voters have not chosen, approved or even known about? Some time ago, Ralf Dekker MP put down questions on this. FVD has now received a formal response from the government. The answer is yes. We are publishing in full a translation of the government’s response to over 20 questions and the answers admit that there are secret binding obligations covering a whole range of issues including ones not obviously related to NATO, like health. The government specifically says that the obligations are laid out in a document which is ‘non-public’, i.e. secret.
Read the government’s response here
Watch the Dutch parliament refuse the debate here
FVD International’s Marco van den Boomgaard attended the CPAC conference in Budapest last week. It is a huge jamboree attracting heads of government, political leaders and influencers. Viktor Orban runs it and his line is very pro-Trump. Marco kindly wrote two pieces for us about the event, one about Orban’s speech and one about Alice Weidel’s. Weidel is de facto leader of the German AfD which, interestingly, sits in a different parliamentary group in the European Parliament from Orban’s Fidesz party (the same group to which FVD is affiliated). Meanwhile, the Slovak prime minister, Robert Fico, is from the political Left but is a patriot who used his own speech to warn against the imminent collapse of the EU.
Read Marco’s article on Viktor Orban here
Read Marco’s article on Alice Weidel here
We discussed CPAC, Trump and conservatism on The Forum this week with brilliant guests, Jim Ferguson from the UK and Lionel from New York. Marco van den Boomgaard and George Szamuely also joined, from The Hague and Budapest. If you missed it, listen back by clicking below.