1. Thierry Baudet is the founder and leader of the far-right Forum for Democracy, for which he has been a member of the House of Representatives since 2017, with the exception of his paternity leave.
40 Facts About Thierry Baudet
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Thierry Baudet's great-great-grandmother, Ernestine van Heemskerck, was born in the Dutch East Indies and was of partly Indonesian parentage.
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Thierry Baudet attended a Haarlem gymnasium, a college preparatory school with compulsory Latin and Ancient Greek.
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Thierry Baudet's 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.
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Thierry Baudet was a post-doctoral fellow at Tilburg University in 2013.
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Thierry Baudet wrote a newspaper column in NRC Handelsblad from 2011 to 2012.
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Thierry Baudet had his personal piano installed in his parliamentary office in The Hague.
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On 26 October 2023, Thierry Baudet was assaulted with an umbrella upon his arrival at Ghent University.
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Thierry Baudet stepped down from the House of Representatives on 12 January 2025 for his paternity leave.
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Thierry Baudet was replaced by Lidewij de Vos, and he plans to return on 3 March 2025.
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At the start of his political career, Thierry Baudet was a national conservative and Eurosceptic, advocating for both the Netherlands' exit from the European Union and the eventual dissolution of the EU, as well as campaigning against unskilled immigration into the Netherlands.
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In 2017, Thierry Baudet expressed admiration for murdered Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, and both ideological and personality comparisons between the two men were made by both Dutch and overseas media.
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Since 2020, journalists, political analysts and former political acquaintances of Thierry Baudet have described his views as having shifted from conservatism and Dutch nationalism to conspiracy theories, radicalism and in some cases neo-fascist and antisemitic opinions.
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In 2024, Thierry Baudet advocated for mass remigration in order to maintain a "white Europe".
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In November 2016, Thierry Baudet co-signed a letter, initiated by the journalists Billy Six and Joost Niemoller, which questioned the independence of the MH17 investigations and requested Donald Trump to press for a new investigation.
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Thierry Baudet disagreed with the conclusions drawn from these texts, and said that the text messages were quoted out of context.
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In February 2022, after Russia officially recognized separatist regions in Ukraine as independent nations and deployed military troops to the Donbas, Thierry Baudet voiced his approval of Vladimir Putin's actions.
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On 24 February 2022, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Thierry Baudet stated that Russia was "unnecessarily being vilified".
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At the start of his career, Thierry Baudet held strongly pro-Israel views; however, these changed after the 2023 Israel-Hamas war, with Thierry Baudet praising DENK's views on the conflict.
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Thierry Baudet has strong opinions on the arts, the topic of his book Oikofobie; he considers non-Western art and Western post-1900 modernism in visual arts inferior to Western Realism, encourages education and programmation of tonal music opposed to atonal music, and dislikes modern post-1950 architecture.
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In reaction to this, musicologist Yuri Landman warned Thierry Baudet for approaching the concept of degenerate art with his conservative criticism.
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Thierry Baudet is not religious but has expressed sympathy for Christianity on several occasions.
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Thierry Baudet has been critical of Islam and expressed concern about both high levels and lack of assimilation of migrants from Islamic societies.
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Thierry Baudet has called for Islamic schools in the Netherlands to subscribe to Western values.
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Thierry Baudet has criticised both Dutch and wider European handling of immigration and assimilation.
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Thierry Baudet frequently speaks about the perceived existence of a "party cartel", in which the main ruling parties of the Netherlands divide power among themselves and conspire towards the same goals, despite claiming to be competitors.
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In February 2018, Thierry Baudet was confronted with the question of whether there is a relation between IQ and race in a debate with Femke Halsema.
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Deputy Prime Minister Kajsa Ollongren stated that Forum for Democracy is a bigger threat than the Party for Freedom and that members have an unhealthy fascination for race differences; Thierry Baudet made a complaint for defamation at an Amsterdam police station.
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Thierry Baudet is an adherent of the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory, which states there is a calculated effort to destroy Western culture by academic and intellectual means.
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Thierry Baudet accuses the European Union of being "a Cultural Marxist project, with the aim of destroying European Civilization".
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Thierry Baudet has stated that COVID-19 was introduced by George Soros to "steal freedom", a claim he denies.
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Thierry Baudet soon returned as party leader but by then many party members had left Forum for Democracy, including the majority of the Senators and all of the party's members of the European Parliament.
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In 2021, Thierry Baudet responded to an article about the migrant population of Brussels by tweeting that an "escape-strategy, Madagascar or something" was needed.
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In September 2021, Thierry Baudet attended a protest against the measures to combat COVID-19, in which several protesters wore Jewish badges, which drew condemnation.
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Thierry Baudet was widely condemned by other politicians and Jewish organisations.
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Thierry Baudet is pro-Russian, and has said that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is the fault of the West.
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Thierry Baudet said he was a fan of Vladimir Putin, whom he called "a hero we need".
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Thierry Baudet said the Russian president is the only one who can take on the elite.
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Thierry Baudet believes Putin must win the war against Ukraine and says "we must do everything we can to support him".
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Thierry Baudet claimed to have had a love affair with political commentator Eva Vlaardingerbroek in 2017.