While attention in recent campaign weeks was mainly focused on the significant growth of D66, CDA and JA21, the radical right Forum for Democracy (FVD) also grew in the shadows. The three seats in the Chamber appear to become seven, more than doubling. “We have a foot in the door and we are kicking it open,” said the loudly applauded party leader Lidewij de Vos on Wednesday evening after seeing the exit polls. The party is full of self-confidence. “We are ready to talk about coalition negotiations,” she added afterwards.
For a long time, the FVD hovered around the three seats in the polls. It wasn’t until September that steady growth began. It appears that many new voters switched from the PVV or did not vote last time from research by Ipsos commissioned by the NOS. A small portion previously voted VVD and NSC.
The seat gain appears to be related to the arrival of De Vos as the new party leader. At the end of August, FVD announced that founder Thierry Baudet would step aside in favor of De Vos, because he would “stand in the way of the party’s growth.” Baudet remains party chairman and is second on the list of candidates. Under Baudet, the FVD had a turbulent history full of commotion, incidents and splits. For example, in 2021 he was sentenced to a penalty if he did not delete his tweets in which he compared corona policy to the Holocaust – he then deleted the tweets.
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No slip-ups
Of the eight seats that FVD won in the 2021 parliamentary elections, three remained two years later. De Vos has now managed to almost completely make up for that loss. She regularly appeared on current affairs programs on TV and radio and was interviewed by newspapers – the party previously complained that Baudet was never invited by the media again. Within the party, the 28-year-old party leader is seen as a breath of fresh air. During election night, members chanted her name. When asked about the ‘Lidewij effect’ she said herself on Wednesday: “Who knows. In any case, it seems that we have been able to appeal to a new voter group.” She called Baudet’s decision to step aside “noble”.
According to FVD co-founder Henk Otten, who left the party in 2019 after a disagreement with Baudet, the leadership change has been decisive. “Any party leader other than Thierry Baudet would have doubled the number of seats,” he says by telephone. According to Otten, Baudet had become the main “inhibiting factor” within the party with his “pseudo-intellectual boreal visions” and controversial statements about Putin as a “fantastic guy”.
In terms of content, De Vos’s story does not differ from that of Baudet. She advocates remigration for people who cannot settle in the Netherlands – a controversial concept, according to the German Federal Agency for Citizen Education a “demand for mass deportation of people with a migration background.” De Vos also wants an asylum stop, termination of international treaties, normalization of trade relations with Russia and is also against climate measures. “Thierry and I are on the same page in terms of content,” she said earlier in an interview with NRC. “It’s just someone else telling the story.”
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Social media
De Vos’s face was everywhere. Between August 27 and September 25, the FVD spent by far the most money on online political advertisements of all parties, it turned out. from a study by a research institute Justice for Prosperity. On Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and Google alone, Forum spent almost 100,000 euros twice as much as number two, D66. Justice for Prosperity pointed out that FVD did not shy away from using polarizing themes and keywords such as ‘transgender propaganda’ and ‘left-wing indoctrination’. To prevent foreign influence and ‘micro-targeting’ – based on privacy-sensitive data – online political advertisements were banned according to EU law after October 10.
On her own TikTok account, De Vos posted fourteen videos of herself on election day alone. FVD was the first party to fully embrace the Chinese video platform TikTok. Baudet has more than 243,000 followers. Lidewij de Vos first created an account in September and now has 64,000 followers. For comparison: Rob Jetten (D66) created an account in 2024 and has 73,000 followers.
At the same time, the party’s visibility on the streets through posters and billboards increased significantly. FVD is by far the largest political party in the Netherlands in terms of members. In addition to government subsidies and donations, more than sixty thousand paying members, a large portion of whom are present on social media, guarantee an annual source of income of at least one and a half million euros. On December 31, 2024, the party’s equity amounted to almost 1.7 million euros. A large donation traditionally came from Peter Poot, who donated 100,000 euros together with a business partner on August 22, 2025. Poot and his company Chipshol waged an endless legal battle with Schiphol over area development around the airport. Frustration over alleged opposition led Poot to a crusade against authority figures.
According to former FVD member Otten, Forum has returned to the successful campaign for the 2019 Provincial Council elections, when the party became the largest. “Even then we did not receive much media attention, but we spent a fortune on billboards on the street,” he says. Otten also sees similarities in terms of content. “At that time we emphasized ‘kik’, or climate, immigration and purchasing power. Now, De Vos has also spoken a lot about unaffordable climate measures and the consequences of mass immigration and there was attention to economic topics.”
Far right
Yet political scientist Sarah de Lange, who specializes in the extreme right, calls it remarkable that FVD has won so much. “It is a party that was almost not active in Parliament during the last cabinet period and a party that, according to more and more political scientists, belongs to the extreme right,” says De Lange.
De Lange himself makes a distinction between radical right parties (such as JA21 and the PVV) that accept the democratic system but want to fundamentally reform it, and the extreme right (such as FVD), which wants to overthrow the democratic constitutional state and does not shy away from political violence. The three parties all fall under the umbrella term ‘far right’. That far-right bloc has grown from 41 to 42 seats. “The government period and the fall of the cabinet cost the PVV seats, but not the bloc itself,” says De Lange. According to her, the PVV voters have spread across FVD and JA21.
She warns against the VVD moving to the right flank, which, according to De Lange, is a sign of normalizing far-right ideas: “The VVD’s open support of the FVD’s ‘Antifa motion’ showed that the VVD was also looking for voters on that flank.” The possibility that JA21 will join the government in a cabinet strengthens this normalization, according to De Lange. “In this way, there will soon be a strong radical right representation in the cabinet and in the opposition.”
Remigration
While the party mainly complained about the European Union’s “absurd” immigration plans in its 2019 election manifesto, Forum has now taken a much more radical course. Various party prominents maintain close ties with the Austrian right-wing extremist Martin Sellner, who, together with like-minded radicals such as Eva Vlaardingerbroek, is trying to get the theme of ‘remigration’ more emphatically on the political agenda. With success. At the beginning of this year, Lidewij de Vos’ partner – and number nine – visited on the FVD candidate list – Massimo Etalle a lecture by Sellner at the nationalist organization Voorpost. Last spring, number four on the list Frederik Jansen attended a ‘remigration summit’ in Italy by Sellner and associates.
We store biometric characteristics of returnees, so that they cannot return to the Netherlands after return
The word ‘remigration’ appears seventeen times in this year’s FVD election manifesto. The program talks about “millions of people” who have come to the Netherlands and “often do not or hardly integrate”. The party wants to encourage “people who do not fit here” to leave the Netherlands with a “remigration grant” and “remigration coaches”. “We store biometric characteristics of remigrants, so that they cannot return to the Netherlands after return,” according to the party program.
FVD party leader Lidewij de Vos responds to the results of the House of Representatives elections.
Photo OLAF KRAAK / ANP
In a podcast about the immigration summit in Italy, the Flemish Dries Van Langenhove, a regular guest of FVD, who was convicted of racism and prohibited possession of weapons, used the words ‘remigration’ and ‘deportation’ interchangeably. Van Langenhove also called remigration “the friendly option”. On the Forum website, money is being raised through crowdfunding for a fine that a Belgian judge has imposed on Van Langenhove.
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