About six weeks before Thierry Baudet was elected Member of Parliament, it was at the time when Jort Kelder helped pay for the FVD campaign films, the Russia Today (now RT) propaganda channel interviewed him.
Baudet texted his then co-director Henk Otten about it on February 2, 2017. “I get 150 euros for that.”
You don’t see this often: an unelected politician who gets attention in a foreign medium during campaign time, and is also paid. He texted: “Shall I give the account number of the foundation.”
Otten: “Do not accept.”
“We need money,” Baudet wrote.
“We should absolutely not take money from the Russians. Would stay away from that RT anyway.”
At the time, there were already concerns in the security services that ‘state actors’ such as Russia would make their ‘entry’ into national politics under the ‘increasing threat of espionage’. I quoted a confidential NCTV document about this in January 2017 in this section. It remained unclear who the NCTV was referring to, but after the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Thursday morning, questions arose again about the connections of Thierry Baudet and his party.
The FVD leader showed understanding for the attack after he insulted Putin (“beautiful guy”) in recent weeks and the conflict declared from ‘NATO aggression’ and ‘absurd warmongering’ from the EU and the World Economic Forum, two organizations without military resources.
So it happened that the calm parliamentary historian Bert van den Braak, professor in Maastricht, wondered why the Presidium of the House is not investigating “the Russian connection of Baudet and FVD”. He suggested it back then zembla brought revelations about Baudet’s pro-Russian network in 2020. “The need seems even more pressing to me now.”
That is why I thought: let me look back at exactly what we know about the Russian contacts of Baudet and other politicians over the past ten years. It showed a clear pattern.
June 2014 you had a riot in the PVV. According to The Telegraph was party leader Geert Wilders angry on PVV MP Raymond de Roon. After the annexation of Crimea, he criticized Putin’s ‘intervention doctrine’ in the Chamber and wanted to suspend European arms sales to the Kremlin.
Wilders emailed: “This is really too critical of Russia. (-) Why don’t I know anything about this??
PVV members whispered that their party leader ally Marine Le Pen did not want to hurt. In Paris you had a pro-Russian institution, IDC, and its director since 2008, British conservative John Laughland, agreed at the time that Le Pen’s relationship with the Kremlin was “very friendly.” The pro-European protests in the Maidan uprising, earlier that year in Kiev, he mentioned, like the Kremlin, the product of Western propaganda.
Laughland, a frequent guest on the Kremlingezinde Russia Today, and now on RT, was already an acquaintance of Baudet: he helped the young Dutchman with his thesis and in Baudet’s Attack on the Nation State (2012) he frequently quoted Laughland approvingly.
Laughland’s reasoning was often a reversal of Western logic: he saw the problems of Eastern European rulers like Lukashenko (Belarus) or Milosevic (Serbia) as a result not of their dictatorial traits, but of Western expansionism through the EU or NATO. . The format with which Baudet assessed the Ukraine conflict this week.
And the referendum on the EU association agreement with Ukraine fitted this criticism perfectly. Baudet joined in 2015 with FVD “almost begging”, wrote GeenStijl later, after the shock blog initiated it with the Citizens’ Committee EU. Thus it happened that in September 2015 Baudet expressed the Russian criticism of the treaty in NRC (“provides prospects for future EU membership”).
From autumn 2015, Baudet’s interactions with Russian Vladimir Kornilov followed, later revealed by means of zembla† Baudet called him “a Russian who works for Putin” in an FVD app group. In an interview for a Ukrainian website, he told Kornilov what the Kremlin wanted to hear: the referendum should lead, Baudet said, to “dismantling the EU”. When there was a threat of money, he texted Otten: “Maybe Kornilov will pay extra.”
After his election as MP in 2017, in which he played out his referendum fame, Baudet came to Laughland’s aid. The Briton left the pro-Kremlin institute in Paris in 2018, and Baudet suggested him within FVD as a candidate for the European Parliament. Henk Otten prevented it.
In the meantime, Wilders also turned against “the hysterical Russophobia”: he made in EW announced a friendship visit to Russia in 2018. Later that year, the PVV and FVD broke the unanimity in the Chamber about the compensation proceedings that the Netherlands started against Russia regarding MH17, where they demonstrably used fallacies.
In 2019, after Otten’s departure, Baudet still brought in Laughland at FVD: he became an employee of the European faction. Later got his doctorate He also made Laughland a ‘party ideologue’ of FVD. But tensions arose in the European FVD group: Laughland always ticked pro-Putin and pro-Serbia motions on the voting lists, and delegation leader Derk Jan Eppink therefore took this work off his hands. Later in 2020, the faction switched in full to JA21, for which Eppink is now a Member of Parliament.
March 2020, corona was already in the Netherlands, Laughland was also allowed to speak in the House at the request of the FVD at a hearing on judicial interference in politics, in which Laughland focused on the European Court of Justice, again a popular Russian angle. In addition to his performances at RT, Laughland now writes for the international website of FVD.
This week Baudet became more rash by the day. The room would being “a ridiculous institution” and he scolded Wopke Hoekstra when the Minister of Foreign Affairs criticized Putin: “Stop it, moron.” And not to forget he presented again a popular Russian theme: the question of whether Dutch ‘NATO membership is still up to date’.
If you looked at everything, it would have been a formidable operation of influence: in decades the Russian interest had not been so clear in Dutch public opinion. Take the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956 and the attacks on the CPN headquarters after that: there were no comparable scenes at FVD this week.
Theoretically you could say: Baudet is not guided by interests but by his independence. But his pro-Russian positions present rather large inconsistencies. Who does he support – the autocrat or the democrat? Whose interests does he represent in the House – Dutch or Russian? As an anti-migration politician, why should he praise Putin now that the president is driving hundreds of thousands of refugees into Europe? Etc.
And then you had the code of conduct for MPs. Parliamentary historian Van den Braak mentioned three behaviors that raise questions. A Member of Parliament who systematically stands up for a non-Dutch interest “may be violating the code of conduct because he does not vote without a burden”. A representative who attacks the House as an institution and insults a minister “may affect the dignity of the office”. Wednesday was also added that nu.nl revealed that there is a case against Baudet due to unreported additional income of 85,000 euros.
“These three matters,” said Van den Braak, “should be more than enough for the Presidium of the House to start an investigation.”
A version of this article also appeared in NRC Handelsblad on 26 February 2022
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of February 26, 2022