The only PVV politician in the European Parliament, Marcel de Graaff, switches to Forum for Democracy. De Graaff does this because of “the current course with regard to Corona”, according to a statement sent out by Forum for Democracy. De Graaff has requested his switch NRC confirmed.
Where the PVV largely endorses the seriousness of the corona crisis, FVD speaks of a conscious conspiracy of politicians who seize the pandemic to limit the freedom of citizens. De Graaff also believes in that conspiracy. In his statement, he speaks, among other things, about “a government that is close friends with the World Economic Forum” and he refers to the corona vaccine as a “harmful, experimental drug”.
On his Twitter account, De Graaff has been warning for some time about a Third World War and a political coup. “Conspiracy wappies are right again. And the spike protein turns out to be the bioweapon. Behind the scenes ‘people’ knew about this. Time for tribunal!” he tweeted, for example, in mid-January.
Vote against your own party line
Earlier this week, news medium Politico calculated that Van der Graaff in Parliament was among the politicians who most often voted against the line of their European group. Yet people in the vicinity of De Graaff did not see his transfer coming. A former PVV member who knows him well says he is “surprised” that he is exchanging the larger and more internationally known PVV in the Netherlands for Forum.
De Graaff was a member of parliament for the PVV for eleven years, initially as a member of the Senate, later in the European Parliament. The PVV is part of the fourth largest group: Identity and Democracy. De Graaff was not only the leader and leader of the European PVV party for many years, he was also co-chair of the predecessor of Identity and Democracy: the eurosceptic bloc Europe of Nations and Freedom. His wife Gabriëlle Popken, who also works in the European Parliament, was previously a member of the Senate and House of Representatives for the PVV and once worked as a personal assistant for party leader Geert Wilders.
Seat thanks to Brexit
The PVV completely disappeared from the European Parliament in the European elections in May 2019: De Graaff just fell short of votes for a seat. A year later he was still able to take that place, because the Netherlands was allowed to fill three of the vacant seats after the departure of the British from the European Union.
With the arrival of De Graaff, Forum for Democracy is again represented in the European Parliament after a year of absence. Three FVD members were elected to Parliament in 2019, but all three moved to JA21 in December 2020 when FVD was torn apart by an internal crisis centered on power and racist app traffic within the JFVD youth movement.
According to Forum, on behalf of the party, he will “deploy against the advancing vaccination compulsion” in the European Parliament and will “build a European coalition of corona critics”.
Also read this article from 2015 about the PVV in the European Parliament: Nice, ruin the European party
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