Thierry Baudet

Thierry Henri Philippe Baudet (Dutch: [ˈtɕɛri boːˈdɛ(t), - bʌuˈdɛ(t)]; born 28 January 1983) is a Dutch far-right politician, author, and self-declared conspiracy theorist. He is the founder and leader of Forum for Democracy (FvD), for which he was a member of the House of Representatives between 2017 and 2026, with the exception of his paternity leave.

Early life

Baudet was born in Heemstede into a family of partial Huguenot ancestry. His forefather, Pierre Joseph Baudet, immigrated to the Batavian Republic in 1795 when his home in Hainaut was annexed by the French Republic, fleeing from conscription into the French Army. Baudet's great-great-grandmother, Ernestine van Heemskerck, was born in the Dutch East Indies and was of partly Indonesian parentage.

Baudet attended the Latin School of Haarlem, a college preparatory school with compulsory Latin and Ancient Greek. His 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. The dissertation was directed by Leiden professor Paul Cliteur and the British philosopher Roger Scruton, and was published in Dutch as De aanval op de natiestaat (The Attack on the Nation-State).

Career

Baudet was a post-doctoral fellow at Tilburg University in 2013. He also wrote a newspaper column in NRC Handelsblad from 2011 to 2012. In 2016, he founded the Forum for Democracy (FvD, Dutch: Forum voor Democratie), which became a political party, and he was elected along with Theo Hiddema to the House of Representatives in the 2017 general election.