He calls it “the last plea” to the “one-dimensional wappies” in his party. The 77-year-old senator and criminal lawyer Theo Hiddema says so at the end of the interview. He wants to make an ultimate attempt to stop the advance of the “infantile bombast” party members within Forum for Democracy (FVD).
Soon political leader Thierry Baudet will drag you before a tribunal?
Hiddema laughs. “Would they come up with a purging commission?” In that case, he will take Gerard Spong as his lawyer. In any case, the Member of Parliament no longer wants to remain silent about his dissatisfaction. “It’s enough,” says Hiddema in his Amsterdam canal house.
The division of minds between Hiddema and the FVD establishment has grown steadily over the past year. In November last year, Hiddema left the party’s parliamentary group after an argument about anti-Semitic and racist messages at the youth section of Forum for Democracy, the JFVD.
In April of this year he returned to The Hague as a member of the Senate within the three-member FVD faction. “I was curious about the Senate. By meeting one day a week, I keep a finger on the pulse of national politics and I can still plead criminal cases. I don’t have to do it for the money.”
Don’t you receive 32,000 euros a year as a senator?
“Is that right? I have earned enough as a lawyer and have always had little time to spend. So I can manage financially.”
In the past year, Hiddema, who was elected to the House of Representatives with 45,000 preferential votes in 2017, saw his party change. The party positions “to which I feel indebted” on matters such as direct democracy, the nation-state or asylum policy no longer play “any role,” he says. “That is very frustrating, because those positions made us the largest party in the country in the polls. I don’t have my voter mandate because I proclaimed how we should deal with the Holocaust. Or what to do against satanic ritual child abuse. Or how we should resist the global corona conspiracy.”
Yet these are the themes with which the FVD is now working day in and day out in the House of Representatives and on social media. “The perspective with which you gain persuasiveness is now hard to find within Forum. People allow themselves too much to be tempted into a dogged fighting mode,” says Hiddema.
Hiddema – who welcomes his visit with outstretched hand – has not yet been vaccinated against corona, he says after some insistence. “Out of laziness”, not because Baudet emphatically rejects vaccination. “Piss off.”
Hiddema has recently been throwing more and more “stones in the pond” via Twitter (90,000 followers) to express his dissatisfaction with the new party course. But his cryptic and sarcastic messages are not understood by everyone.
Last month, Hiddema became “ill-tempered” after a “repulsive” tweet from his foreman. Baudet posted a message with a photo of a boy who is not allowed to attend the Sinterklaas parade because he is not vaccinated. Next to it was a photo of a boy with a Star of David in a concentration camp. It is part of a series of messages in which Baudet labels unvaccinated people as “the new Jews” and “squints out” as “the new Nazis and NSB members”. Two weeks ago, the Amsterdam court ordered Baudet to remove those tweets because they are “unnecessarily offensive”.
Also read: According to experts, the verdict on Baudet’s Holocaust comparisons is ‘solidly substantiated’
Hiddema hopes to “get Baudet in my direction” by sending apps. He takes out his mobile phone and reads out messages he recently exchanged with Baudet.
“Why are you continuously angry”, appt Baudet after a comment from Hiddema.
After the photo of the boy with the Star of David, Hiddema reports to Baudet “to bear the political offense of Jewish suffering badly”. He points out that as a starting lawyer in Maastricht in the 1970s, he “saw the branded arm” of his patron Max Moszkowicz Sr. for six years. The now 95-year-old lawyer was the only one of his family to survive the Auschwitz concentration camp. “The boy in your tweet could have been him. He has seen how his parents and sister were separated from him.”
What did Baudet answer?
“Nothing.”
Why not join the party that is spreading ‘abhorrent’ messages?
“I am not going to defect to another party. I know that Baudet is not an anti-Semite, he is too intelligent for that, like the reporter from Privately, Bram Moszkowicz, in his interview with Baudet in the Christmas issue now repeats after me.”
Also read: What should the media do with Forum for Democracy?
If the leader keeps saying bad things, isn’t that a reason to leave?
“Baudet is only recalcitrant because he has been pressed into the fascist corner by established politics from the start without any provocation. It’s pure wrath. He is also too lightly influenced by people from the propaganda department: JFVD people who make wrong tweets for him with well-thumbed fingers. Those types have to be thrown onto the street with tar and feathers.”
Hiddema now says he is raising his voice publicly because “I don’t want people in the legal practice that I highly value to think that I also have such objectionable ideas. I don’t want that gunk to surround me all the time.” The politician is also afraid that FVD will attract “only wappie thinkers”.
Do you still have the illusion that you can change the course of your party?
“It can’t get any worse than this. At Christmas, the JFVD wished us a ‘Happy Yuletide’. What a bullshit. What are we looking for in the purity cult of the ancient Germans? This Boy Scout behavior is not my preference.”
When is it finally enough for you?
“If Baudet does not want to silence those purity apostles with their WWII obsessions and as a result they are again accused of wrongdoing Jewish suffering, then the pipe is full with me.”
Do you still have support within Forum?
“I got to know a lot of sensible people in the party. They also feel uncomfortable. Luckily I’m in the Senate, I’ve moved to a quieter place. But I can’t hate Baudet. I know how he is. And maybe Baudet will come to his senses. I have also seen people in the detention center change.”
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