Thierry Baudet has won the members’ referendum around his party leadership from Forum for Democracy. Of the 37,000 members who voted, 76 percent want to keep Baudet as their leader. The party announced this on Friday evening.
With the result, Thierry Baudet seems to definitively settle the power struggle within Forum in his favor. As “party leader” he can now make the nomination for a new party board and the House of Representatives list, and thus bend the party to his will.
Baudet’s stay is expected to trigger a second exodus of FvD representatives. The three-headed FvD group in the European Parliament already declared itself independent on Friday evening. Earlier, five members of the group in South Holland and the group chairman in Friesland also said that they would do so if Baudet won. Dozens of representatives have already resigned in the past two weeks, including Member of Parliament Theo Hiddema.
The reason was Baudet’s refusal to distance himself from the youth association JFvD and its chairman Freek Jansen, a confidant of Baudet. Several prominent figures also accused him of making anti-Semitic statements.
With the exodus, Baudet pays a high price for his profit, although according to former intimates he will not grieve for long. He has his party back and can take a more radical course, no longer held back by moderate forces within Forum. There is a good chance that ties will be restored with youth association JFvD, which was discredited by anti-Semitic and racist messages and did not take adequate action against them.
No notary
The referendum had a remarkably short run-up. On Thursday afternoon, the party board announced that the ballot box would open a few hours later, and that it would stay until 6 pm on Friday. The board decided to send a digital voting link to everyone who was a member of FvD in the past year and has paid a membership fee. Members who canceled their membership in recent weeks – there would be thousands – could therefore vote.
The membership consultation was conducted by Big Pulse, an Australian company specializing in online voting. FvDs from both “camps” watched, as did external IT specialists, says interim chairman Lennart van der Linden. There was no notary, customary for these kinds of votes: according to Van der Linden, there was no notary to be found “with the right knowledge and who wanted to do this in a hurry”.
Opponents of Baudet expressed strong objections to the referendum, which would lack any legal basis. The board and Baudet then acknowledged that the party statutes indeed do not mention a binding referendum. However, both sides openly committed themselves to the result beforehand. The doubts increased when reports appeared of members who had already left FvD in previous years but were still able to cast a vote.
Lawsuit
Immediately after the results were announced, Johan Almekinders and Wouter Weyers, until recently the FvD party chairmen in Overijssel and Utrecht respectively, and candidate MP Jan Cees Vogelaar announced that they would file a lawsuit. The three want the judge to annul the decision to organize a referendum.
In a statement they cracked, among other things, the lack of a realistic alternative to party leadership: it was only possible to vote for or against Baudet. Organizing this referendum “is evidence of improper governance and possibly even mismanagement,” the trio write.
