That’s what Paternotte says Wednesday against the NOS. This makes D66 the first major group in the House to push for stricter measures to ban political parties if necessary. Because the current law offers few options for this, an amendment to the law is required.
Paternotte responds to the latest outrage about FvD MP Gideon van Meijeren. For some time now, it has referred to the cabinet as ‘the regime’ that ‘must be overthrown’. At the beginning of this week, he called on his supporters to ‘move up’ to the House of Representatives and to remain there until the government is gone. Victims may be avoidable, he warned.
This led, not for the first time, to sharply disapproving reactions from the cabinet and the House of Representatives, including from Paternotte: ‘Democracy is being destroyed from within. By enemies of democracy. How long are we going to let this happen?’
The law is now extremely reluctant to prohibit political parties: it is precisely in the case of a political party – founded to express the opinion of its own voters – that a ban has a profound impact on the democratic constitutional state and freedom of expression. For that reason, MPs, ministers and state secretaries cannot be prosecuted for statements they make in parliament.
Only CP’86 prohibited
The parties must therefore go very far in order to qualify for a ban. Since World War II, in 1998, only the far-right party CP’86 was banned for systematically inciting violence and promoting discrimination against Dutch people with a migration background. The Amsterdam court declared that attitude ‘contrary to public order’.
However, under the influence of the increasingly radical expressions of the Forum for Democracy and Geert Wilders’ PVV, the debate about the possibilities for prohibition has been shifting for some time. In 2018, the State Committee on the Parliamentary System recommended amending the law to include a regulation that makes it possible to ban political parties that pose a serious threat to the democratic constitutional state. Although the third Rutte cabinet reacted favorably to this, a detailed bill has not yet been drafted under the current cabinet either.
Paternotte now takes up the gauntlet. He wants to amend the law that allows associations such as criminal motorcycle gangs to be banned. Political parties are currently excluded from this. “We say: it cannot be the case that in this time, when you see that democracy is under pressure everywhere, we say that undermining the rule of law is not allowed, unless you are a political party,” said Paternotte.
He explicitly refers to the Forum for Democracy: ‘A lot has been said there lately. From: we want to overthrow the government to: violence is nice, because it can change things. We have to take that seriously.’
It is uncertain whether Paternotte will receive much support in the House. For the time being, only the Volt faction insisted on a tougher approach to FvD. Party leader Dassen believes that the debate about the increasingly radical expressions of the FvD MPs is too much stuck in indignation. He previously called FvD ‘of course a danger to the rule of law and democracy’.