Growing Dutch debate about banning parties

D66 MP Jan Paternotte proposes amending the Civil Code. With that, it is possible to ban criminal motorbike gangs and comparable groups. Political parties are exempted from that explicitly.
Scrapping would be the easiest way to create the possibility of banning a political movement. He thinks it takes too long to do this via the Law on Political Parties.

Paternotte is in a hurry because of the “radicalisation” of some groups, most likely Forum for Democracy. Last Sunday, Forum MP Gideon van Meijeren spoke about a “velvet revolution” by sending the masses to the governmental district in The Hague and forcing the authorities to resign.

Almost all political leaders, including Prime Minister Rutte himself, have disapproved of this. It would be no less than an occupation. At the moment, the Dutch police are reviewing Van Meijeren’s statement about whether this is punishable or not.

A few weeks ago, Van Meijeren created upheaval to portray a TV journalist on Youtube as a “sewer rat”. Later he said that The Netherlands is no longer a constitutional state since the country is led by an unknown elite, who have to be “overthrown”. Some weeks before that, Baudet himself attracted attention by admitting that he believed in “conspiracies” and that this world is governed by “evil reptiles”. He distanced himself from Christianity by saying that this religion is for losers.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Baudet has repeatedly said that this operation is "encouraging" since Russia is working against the culture of globalism. He thinks it was wrong for NATO to expand to the east, and Russia is right to feel threatened by this.

The general accusation against Forum for Democracy is that this movement is anti-democratic and antisemitic.

Paedosexuality

Usually, the people that want to ban certain groups point to right-wing parties. Earlier, there has been debate about anti-immigration parties. So far, the result of the discussion has been that there is no parliamentary support for such a ban and that other parties have to solve the matter with words.

Historically, the Dutch legal order is so that it happens very seldomly that organisations get a ban. It happened in 2018 with the motorbike club Satudarah because the judge was convinced that this was, in fact, a criminal gang. And it happened too with Martijn in 2012, an organisation that was working towards accepting paedo-sexuality.