Column | Proud Farmer – NRC

Four years ago we had Thierry Baudet, now we have Caroline van der Plas. She will have great success in the Provincial Council elections next week, as Baudet triumphed in previous elections. Talk shows run away with her, populism can have a new face.

“You helped Baudet get into the saddle,” Jeroen Pauw, host of Sjuul Paradijs’ talk show, said recently. So says the former editor of The Telegraph, a newspaper that has tried nothing but to help one populist after another, also indirectly through hate campaigns against decent politicians such as Femke Halsema and Sigrid Kaag. Pauw could easily refute the charge in this case as Paradijs turned out not to have the facts in chronological order.

The thing is, talk shows in general are far too eager to open their doors to populist politicians. Recalcitrance is simply good for viewers. Especially Fortuyn and Baudet and even now Eerdmans and Van der Plas have made grateful use of it.

How much TV fame is sought after is shown this week in an interview in loyalty with Henk Otten, the co-founder of Forum for Democracy who was eventually kicked out as a member after a clash with Baudet. “You wanted to use Baudet? asks the interviewer. Otten: “Yeah, I thought: he goes very well in front of the camera, looks fresh, a modern figurehead.” He considered Baudet “a good version of what went wrong after Fortuyn”.

What happend? What was still called pride with Fortuyn has become delirious with Baudet. Baudet turned out to be mad. After his triumph in the Provincial Council elections, he delivered a speech as laughable as it was incomprehensible on the owl of Minerva and boreal Europe. “I had tears in my eyes,” Otten says now. “It was almost intellectual bullshit. It destroyed the party.

Luckily, you might think, but Otten – populists never unlearn this – thinks it’s a missed opportunity. Basically, he is more disappointed with the person Baudet than with the politician Baudet. “And I didn’t realize enough how bad Baudet is. […] Very sneaky. I went for success and he went for himself. He mentions that Baudet has questionable ties to Russia (“Putin is a great guy”), but more as a minor fact.

Will Caroline van der Plas be the new Baudet? In terms of electoral success, probably yes, but after that the comparison will soon no longer hold. She seems to me much more down-to-earth and less vain than Baudet, she will not push her supporters away with haughty gossip. She therefore remains the darling of the talk shows as a proud farmer, who shrugs her shoulders in front of these idiotic politicians with complicated speeches. One can count on endless repetition of his usual repertoire: nitrogen objections hoho, farmers yes. If it’s up to Van der Plas, I will soon be able to have a “kangaroo house”, a garden house near my children, so that they can take care of me. What more do old people want?

Van der Plas will become a new version of Fortuyn rather than Baudet. In this sense, she may be a more difficult adversary for established politics than Baudet ever was. Wilders also has a competitor.