Thierry Henri Philippe Baudet (; born 28 January 1983) is a Dutch far-right politician, author and self-declared conspiracy theorist. He is the founder and leader of Forum for Democracy (FvD), and has been a member of the House of Representatives since 2017. He also serves as the party's parliamentary leader. He is a controversial politician due to his political views, and his use of personal attacks against his opponents.
Early life
Baudet was born in Heemstede into a family of partial Walloon ancestry. His forefather, Pierre Joseph Baudet, immigrated to the Batavian Republic in 1795 when his home in Hainaut was annexed by the French Republic, fleeing from conscription into the French Army. Baudet's great-great-grandmother, Ernestine van Heemskerck, was born in the Dutch East Indies and was of partly Indonesian parentage.
Baudet attended a Haarlem gymnasium, a college preparatory school with compulsory Latin and Ancient Greek. His first degree, from the University of Amsterdam, was in history, and from 2007 to 2012 he was a PhD student at Leiden University, where in 2012 he graduated as a Doctor of Philosophy with a thesis on national identity, European identity, and multiculturalism. The dissertation was directed by Leiden professor Paul Cliteur and the British philosopher Roger Scruton and was published in Dutch as The Attack on the Nation-State. An English translation was also published, called The Significance of Borders.
Career
Baudet was a post-doctoral fellow at Tilburg University in 2013. He also wrote a newspaper column in NRC Handelsblad from 2011 to 2012.
In 2016, he founded the Forum for Democracy (FvD, ), which became a political party, and he was elected along with Theo Hiddema to the House of Representatives in the 2017 general election.
Baudet had his personal piano installed in his parliamentary office in the Hague. In 2018, he said that his current girlfriend was an Iranian refugee.
In 2018, he was awarded the Prize for Liberty by the Flemish classical-liberal think tank Libera!.
On 26 October 2023, Baudet was assaulted with an umbrella upon his arrival at Ghent University.
Political views
Baudet is a national conservative and Eurosceptic, advocating for both the Netherlands' exit from the European Union and the eventual dissolution of the EU. He is against unskilled immigration into the Netherlands. In a speech he described immigration as causing a homeopathic dilution of the Dutch culture, and in an interview said he wants to preserve the native cultures and ethnicities of Europe as they are.
Baudet is opposed to the European Union–Ukraine Association Agreement. Together with GeenStijl and the Burgercomité EU association, Forum for Democracy was one of the behind the campaign to collect the signatures required for the 2016 Dutch Ukraine–European Union Association Agreement referendum. Baudet and Forum for Democracy campaigned for the "No"-vote in this referendum. During the campaign, Baudet at multiple occasions spread fake news, including false reports of purported crimes by the Ukrainian military, and associated himself with pro-Russian activist Vladimir Kornilov.
In November 2016, Baudet co-signed a letter, initiated by the journalists Billy Six and Joost Niemöller, which questioned the independence of the MH17 investigations and requested Donald Trump to press for a new investigation. This led to criticism from surviving relatives. In May 2018, he supported the Dutch cabinet in holding Russia accountable for the MH17 shootdown incident. Baudet's WhatsApp chats were leaked to the media in 2020; these revealed his close contacts with Vladimir Kornilov, who Baudet described as "a Russian paid by Putin", and demonstrated a significant influence of Kornilov on Baudet's actions on Ukraine, the referendum and future anti-NATO campaigns. In the chats with his FvD colleagues, Baudet also alluded to financial support from Kornilov. Baudet disagreed with the conclusions drawn from these texts, and said that the text messages were quoted out of context. In February 2022, after Russia officially recognized separatist regions in Ukraine as independent nations and deployed military troops to the Donbas, Baudet voiced his approval of Vladimir Putin's actions. On 24 February 2022, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Baudet stated that Russia was "unnecessarily being vilified". During a debate in parliament on February 28, he explicitly refused to condemn the invasion. In August 2022, Baudet described Putin as "a huge hero" fighting a "heroic" fight against "globalists".
