Threats of political violence in the Netherlands are spiraling out of control
Why Dutch politicians fear for their lives
Last week Deputy Prime Minister Sigrid Kaag wiped away tears on a talk show after watching a video of her daughters expressing their fear that she will be murdered.
This made big news. You hear about threats of violence against Dutch politicians all the time these days; her tears demonstrated the toll these threats can take on a family.
A report from the Public Prosecution Service last week put hard numbers to the feeling of an increasingly scary atmosphere: the number of threats against politicians in 2022 (1,125) doubled from 2021 (588).
In her interview, Kaag said that she has not decided whether or not she will continue in politics. This is a huge shift for a party leader who in 2020 said she wanted to be the first Dutch female prime minister.
The Netherlands already has a frightening history of political violence. In the past, this violence originated from individuals, small-time activists, or Islamic extremists.
Now the threats tend to come from from social media, especially internet-fueled, post-pandemic conspiracy theorists.
Who is being threatening now, and why?
Freedom of expression in the post-9/11 world
There have been three significant political murders in the Netherlands last twenty-one years.
In 2002, the anti-immigrant populist Pim Fortuyn was murdered by an animal rights activist, now released after serving eighteen years in prison, who still has not provided a justification for his crime. In a hearing he said: “I saw Fortuyn as a person who was very focused on his own ego. A lust for power. He also always tried to score easily with simplistic ideas… Fortuyn had to be stopped.”
This self-conceptualized tolerant country reeled after Fortuyn’s murder. But it was a crime so unusual, so incomprehensible, that it seemed like a freak accident.
Until two years later.
In 2004, film director Theo van Gogh, an “an outspoken and often offensive critic of Islam” was gruesomely murdered in broad daylight in Amsterdam by Dutch-born Muslim, an associate of a radical Islamist group.
Somehow even more tragically, van Gogh was killed while cycling to his studio to edit a film about Fortuyn’s murder.
In the early 2000’s, the conversation about these two murders, often grouped together, centered around the idea that they were an attack on the freedom of expression. Fortuyn and van Gogh said provocative, offensive things; they were murdered to be silenced.
“I always think of Els Borst”
In 2014, eighty one year-old D66 politician Els Borst (who Kaag’s daughters mention in their interview, not wanting their mother to suffer the same fate), was stabbed to death in her home by a psychiatric patient who claimed to be was operating under a “divine order.”
He said during his appeal: “As a child I had a dream in which God, the devil and Jesus stood before me and said that I must kill the person responsible for euthanasia.”
In 2001, Borst authored the world's first euthanasia law. She also championed use of fetal tissue for scientific research.
Torches and endless death threats
Today, Sigrid Kaag is threatened online constantly; she receives by far the most online hate of all female politicians in the Netherlands.
She is also threatened in person. In 2022, a group showed up at her house with torches, chanting conspiracy theories and broadcasting the event on social media. In February 2023, she was met with more torch-bearers in Diepenheim. They called her a witch, among other things. She is now under surveillance by Dutch forces.
Geert Wilders (the leader of the PVV party) receives death threats daily on social media, mostly for his anti-Islamic views. He has been under constant surveillance since 2004 (!) immediately following van Gogh’s murder, when he was rushed to a safe house.
By the way—Wilders has also called Kaag a “witch.” Kaag calls him “radicalized.” They no longer speak to each other.
Last year, a man was sentenced to community service for sending Hugo de Jonge’s (Minister of Housing) thirteen year-old daughter an Instagram message that said (in English): “I’m gonna kill your father.”
In 2022, Christianne van der Wal (Minister of Nitrogen) was threatened at her house by a man who drove up in a truck with Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh’s names and death dates printed on the tailgate. Her name was listed, her death date a question mark.
The boring, vanilla, “evil” elite
Threats today often come from a new variety of conspiracy theorists, what AVID, the Dutch Intelligence Service, classified this year as “anti-institutional extremists.” (I wrote about this a few weeks ago.)
During the pandemic, people opposed to the government’s corona policy connected on social media and at protests, and their various theories consolidated around the idea of a secret “evil elite” running the world.
In a new report out last week, AVID suggests that anti-institutional extremism is so dangerous because it is “the most tolerant and inclusive extremist movement at the moment.” An ambiguous evil agenda is flexible enough to explain everything that goes wrong in society—Corona, Ukraine, inflation—while the categories of people to blame—politicians, scientists, bureaucrats, journalists, judges, lawyers—always remain the same.
You don’t hear very much about the freedom of expression debate anymore; that only made sense when provocateurs were killed or threatened.
Wilders wanted to ban mosques and close the borders. Van Gogh showed Islamic texts painted on the bodies of women in his 2004 film Submission and called Muslims “goat fuckers.” He was fired from almost every newspaper in the Netherlands for offending readers with his columns. Fortuyn called Islam a “backwards culture,” among many other things.
The politicians being now threatened the most—Kaag, Rutte, de Jonge, van der Wal—are all on the straight and narrow. They’re vanilla. They’re mainstream. They don’t say deliberately inflammatory things.
Dutch politicians aren’t being threatened for what they say anymore. They’re being threatened for being politicians. They’re being threatened for saying anything at all.
And still it gets worse
In a gross twist, the most “provocative” politician we have today, Thierry Baudet, and other members of his Forum for Democracy (FvD) party, themselves spread conspiracy theories which lead directly to death threats on other politicians.
In 2022, during a special House session with the cabinet, Baudet said that it’s a “fact” that St. Antony’s College in Oxford, where Kaag received a master's degree in international relations, is an “educational institution for western spies,” and that Kaag works for the “deep state,” both elements of popular conspiracy theories.
The entire cabinet walked out of the session. (You can watch a video of this striking moment here.) Afterwards Kaag linked these kinds of statements directly to the threats against her.
In 2021, FvD MP Pepijn van Houwelingen threatened college Sjoerd Sjoerdsma on the floor the House of Representatives: "Your time will come, because there will be tribunals." Sjoerdsma received death threats as a result.
The social media-thinking that incites conspiracy theorists also incites politicians—who in turn incite conspiracy theorists. Freedom of expression is out of the question, now that everyone who has something terrible to say can say it on Twitter, no problem, no consequences.
No one who wants to spew inflammatory bullshit is having a hard time expressing themselves, especially politicians. Even on the floor of the House of Representatives.
The restrictions on political freedom in the Netherlands aren’t playing out in terms of expression anymore. They happen in other direction, in terms of personal safety, the freedom to move about the world without a security detail. Now conspiracy theorists can threaten whoever they want whenever they want with zero fear, while boring, unprovocative politicians can’t walk their dogs without looking over their shoulders.
A useless appeal to Twitter
Last week, Vera Bergkamp, the speaker of the House of Representatives, sent a letter to Twitter demanding action against the increasing threats to Dutch politicians.
The NOS asked for a response to Bergkamp’s letter, and received Twitter’s standard auto reply: the shit emoji.
Consequences
After Kaag’s interview, there was a lot of discussion about the impact threats will have on people staying in and entering politics.
And indeed, a Nieuwsuur report from last week found that young people are “less and enthusiastic about entering politics because of threats and the hardened debate.” Some young people who aspire to leadership positions in youth parties are dropping out after online harassment.
The latest AVID report notes that actual violence (beyond torch-bearing and death threats) has been limited so far.
Although [anti-institutional extremists] do not explicitly incite violence, this narrative may in the short term lead to violence against the so-called representatives of the evil elite. Threats against politicians have increased significantly and other individuals such as scientists, journalists, judges and lawyers have also been threatened…
AIVD does not rule out the possibility that this may increase and is conducting research to monitor this threat.
In other words: this problem isn’t going away and could very well get a lot worse.
“Not to be rude,” Kaag’s twenty-seven year old daughter Janna said in the interview, “but actually want my mother to find another job.”
🥳 Leuke Dingetjes
I discovered the Instagram account letsdoubledutch this week and every single reel is so goddamn laugh out loud funny about Dutch and life in the Netherlands… just, well, watch them all. Beetje Engels! Multi-culti.
It’s giving early Interpol
I must have listened to this new track from Amsterdam-based post-punk band Marathon 100 times last week. Obsessed.