During the Troubles, people in Northern Ireland liked to say that even the dogs in the streets knew who planted the bombs. In a small community where mortal enemies lived cheek by jowl, names of perpetrators rarely stayed secret for long, even when cases never came to court. Politiek Den Haag is a similarly claustrophobic world at times, fuelled by intrigue and unspoken truths, so when Czech intelligence services last week named the Netherlands as one of six European nations where politicians were influenced, and possibly paid, by Russia, the absence of surprise was overwhelming.
It sparked a fascinating game of diplomatic poker in the Dutch parliament, in which the home affairs minister Hugo de Jonge admitted to having been briefed on the matter but refused to show his hand. Secrets have to be kept secret for the good of the country, he said, while dropping enough hints to make clear that the allegations went beyond rumour and innuendo. “We should be concerned … this weakens us,” he said, adding that any public disclosure could jeopardise a criminal investigation, which strongly suggests that prosecutors are on the case.
For anyone with even a passing acquaintance of Dutch politics, a handful of names spring to mind whenever the words “Russian interference” enter the discourse. One is Geert Wilders, whose Party for Freedom became the largest in parliament in November’s general election. Wilders was once a strident supporter of Vladimir Putin and a crusader against “Russophobia”. He organised a trip to Moscow in 2018, visiting the Duma with a friendship badge proudly pinned to his lapel. This was before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but after the occupation of Crimea and, perhaps more crucially, the murder of 200 Dutch citizens whose plane was shot down on its way to Malaysia by a Russian-backed militia in 2014. To say Wilders’s visit left a sour taste in the mouth is something of an understatement.
Wilders also, until recently, had a mutual back-scratching relationship with Voice of Europe, the Prague-based website which was shut down by the Czech government last week for spreading Russian propaganda. But since the “special military operation” began he has tempered his enthusiasm for Putin’s regime. He denounced the incursion on its first day as a “flagrant and despicable violation of Ukrainian sovereignty” – though he also blamed Nato expansionism – and more recently condemned the “dreaful” death of Alexei Navalny in a “barbaric penal colony”. Wilders has adopted a quasi-Chinese position on the war, criticising both the Russian invasion and Western support for Ukrainian self-defence: the PVV recently voted against a €2 million military aid package, while Wilders accused the outgoing cabinet of overstretching its authority when it agreed to guarantee Ukraine’s security for the next 10 years. Inevitably, immigration is central to Wilders’s objections, hence his recent attack on the government for giving Ukrainian refugees “free housing, free healthcare and our jobs”.
More pointedly, it was Wilders who called the debate in Parliament to discuss the Czech revelations with Hugo de Jonge, and who led the chorus for the minister to name names, well aware that he was demanding the impossible. One does not survive on the front line of politics for two decades without developing a keen sense of when the potato is too hot or how best to pass it on. Knowing that the insinuations would be piling up at his feet, Wilders decided to get his retaliation in first. “I want names and numbers,” he said, adding that his own party had “never received a cent” from Russia. Given the idiosyncratic nature of the PVV, which has no members other than Wilders and no party infrastructure, that could mean almost anything. But it seems unlikely that an experienced political operator would make such claims without purging his closet of skeletons first. And, of course, as one of the five members of the closed intelligence committee – which comprises the leaders of the largest political parties – Wilders had already been briefed in private on what the Dutch intelligence service AIVD actually knew.
Wilders’s calls for transparency were in marked contrast to the response of Thierry Baudet, the leader of Forum for Democracy, who has never tried to hide his Russian sympathies. Baudet stayed away from last week’s debate, though that should not in itself be taken as evidence of guilt, given how rarely he attends Parliament at the best of times. Instead, he indulged himself with a rambling social media post in which he dismissed the claims of Russian interference as “bickering and speculation based on nothing” and issued a perplexlingly detailed denial of his alleged links with Putin: “No money has been paid to us, there is no ‘kompromat’, no blackmail, no cash, no crypto, no bank transfers – there is no other link whatsoever with the Kremlin”. For a self-proclaimed man of letters, Baudet seems oddly unfamiliar with Queen Gertrude’s comment about the lady protesting too much.
The most striking thing about Baudet’s protestations was their flimsiness. Forum for Democracy first saw the light of day as a think-tank during the referendum on Ukraine’s accession treaty with the European Union, a travesty of democracy to rival a Russian presidential election. Around the time of the referendum Baudet was working closely with the Kyiv-based Vladimir Kornilov, whom he described in app messages as “a Russian who works for Putin” and a “very influential figure”. The website Voice of Europe was founded in the Netherlands by associates of Baudet, and both he and Forum’s European Parliament member, Marcel de Graaff, have appeared on it in the last year, since it was acquired by the pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarch, Viktor Medvechuk. The party’s close ties with Russia, outlined in a 45-minute documentary for current affairs show Zembla, prompted the AIVD to warn Baudet to watch out for spies in 2020, by which time he had been in parliament for three years. But when the Czech allegations surfaced last week, Baudet retorted: “What am I being accused of? Being interviewed?” before excusing himself from the debate – the only party leader to do so. Not even the dogs he was whistling to could have missed the whiff of collusion in his denials.
WordsForPress 