The founder of Forum voor Democratie, Thierry Baudet, is stepping aside as party leader in favour of the far-right party’s most recent MP in a bid to appeal to younger voters.

Baudet, 42, announced at the weekend that he was nominating 28-year-old Lidewij de Vos as FVD’s lead candidate for the general election in October.

De Vos was an MP for 10 weeks earlier this year as a stand-in for Baudet when he took paternity leave following the birth of his second son. She studied biochemistry and neuroscience and has been a parliamentary researcher for FVD since 2021.

Forum currently has three seats in parliament, but Baudet said he was aiming to quadruple that number with De Vos leading the campaign. Baudet himself is numbered second on the list of candidates.

Opinion polls suggest FVD will currently win between two and four seats, but Baudet is hoping De Vos will appeal to floating voters on the right. Another right-wing party, JA21, has been boosted in recent weeks after former deputy justice minister Ingrid Coenradie defected from Geert Wilders’ PVV.

Polarised opinions

“I’m not able to reach that group,” Baudet admitted as he presented his party’s manifesto, Een nieuwe kans voor Nederland (‘A fresh start for the Netherlands’). ”But with Lidewij we’re going to aim for 12 seats. We’re going to take a huge step in terms of media interest.”

Baudet blamed Forum’s lack of progress under his leadership on “polarised opinions about me and a five year-long blockade in the media”.

In a mea culpa that was also a veiled attack on his critics, he added: ”This was partly my own fault – too much of a free thinker, too much of a bigmouth – but also partly the result of framing and being granted nothing.“

De Vos said Forum had “grown in the last 10 years into a movement for people who share a justified, deep-rooted love for the Netherlands”. She she had gone into politics because “the Netherlands that I cherish is being violently attacked.”

Baudet founded Forum in 2017, together with Henk Otten and Rob Rooken, and made an immediate impact, topping the polls for the provincial elections two years later.

The decline set in almost instantly, as Baudet’s victory speech, in which he spoke of the “owl of Minerva” heralding a renaissance of civilised nations in “our boreal world”, alienated both party members and voters.

Breakaways and collapses

FVD’s group of 10 senators crumbled almost immediately after Otten publicly criticised Baudet’s direction following the speech. Baudet retaliated by accusing Otten of financial impropriety in his role as treasurer and expelled him from the party, leading Otten to form a rival group with two other FVD senators.

The party collapsed again in November 2020 when several election candidates quit when racist and anti-Semitic app messages between members of Forum’s youth wing came to light. Two of those candidates, Joost Eerdmans and Annabel Nanninga, founded JA21.

Forum surprisingly won eight seats in the March 2021 general election after running an anti-lockdown campaign, with Baudet becoming an avid promoter of Covid conspiracy theories.

But the party fell apart again within weeks when number two candidate Wybren van Haga led a three-man splinter group that disagreed with Baudet’s style of leadership.