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Ahead of the Dutch European Parliament (EP) elections, 69% of voters declared to a pollster that national politics will have a considerable influence on their vote – a reminder that, in the end, all politics is national.
The rising star of the Netherlands’ heavily fragmented political scene is Thierry Baudet, the founder of Forum for Democracy (Fvd), a right-wing Eurosceptic sovereigntist party founded in late 2016. FvD is now leading the opinion polls, ahead of Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s centre-right VVD. The party has been taking votes from Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom (PVV), previously the leading Eurosceptic force, but has also sought to attract others by presenting a more respectable version of Wilders’ anti-immigration rhetoric, which focused heavily on the influence of Islam. In March, the FvD secured a major electoral victory by coming first in provincial elections, and thereby depriving the government of its majority in the Senate, the Dutch parliament’s upper house.
Baudet is personally a strong supporter of a Dutch exit from the EU (or ‘Nexit,’ as it is often dubbed) and he has accused the media of unfairly depicting Brexit as “very bad”. However, recently, he has clarified that “the Netherlands should not leave the EU tomorrow”, with the party instead calling for a referendum on membership and Baudet suggesting the Netherlands should leave in “stages”.
The lead candidate of FvD’s EP list is well-known Dutch journalist Derk Jan Eppink, who already served a term in the European Parliament after being elected for the Belgian libertarian party Lijst Dedecker, which sits with the British Conservatives in the European Conservative and Reformists (ECR) group. Baudet’s party also intends to join the ECR – though another Dutch party in the ECR, the moderate Eurocritical Christian Union (CU), has said the FvD’s tacit support for ‘Nexit’ should disqualify it from ECR membership.
How large might the Dutch Eurosceptic contingent be?
On 30 April, an Ipsos poll projected that the FvD would obtain 5 seats in the EP, largely at the expense of Wilders’ PVV, which is expected to lose 2 of its 4 seats. Currently, the combined vote share of FvD and the flagging PVV are close to where Wilders’ PVV peaked in opinion polls in January 2016, at around 27% of the electorate. It should be noted that Wilders was never able to convert these poll numbers into election results.
However, the rise of first Wilders and now Baudet has had a significant impact on Dutch politics and, as a result, the Dutch contingent in the European Parliament is likely to look quite Eurosceptic when accounting for the other parties’ policy programmes. [...]