FvD member makes "white power" sign on TikTok; Far-right party again denies it
NRC caught a member of the far-right FvD making the “white power” sign on TikTok. As in a previous case with this same sign, the far-right party denied that its Alkmaar committee member made the white supremacy sign, but did remove the video from TikTok after the newspaper asked about it.
It involves an 18-year-old FvD committee member in Alkmaar, who was fifth on the party’s election list for the municipal elections in March. On April 4, he took the oath and swore allegiance to the Constitution, which prohibits discrimination. NRC decided not to mention the teenager’s name, given his age.
In the video posted on TikTok, the FvD member makes a circle with his thumb and index finger and holds up the other three fingers, forming the letters “wp,” or “white power,” with his fingers. It is the same gesture used by far-right terrorist Brenton Tarrant, who murdered 51 people in New Zealand during attacks on two mosques in 2019. The sign is popular in far-right and white supremacist groups.
The video also shows the text, translated from Dutch, “stop the influx of asylum seekers, start remigration,” and plays the eurotrance song All around the world, also popular in far-right circles.
The young man denies everything. “I expressly dispute that I made a white power statement or subscribe to Nazi/far-right ideology. The gesture in the TikTok was intended as a sarcastic ‘chef’s kiss’ in a political context,” he told the newspaper in a written response. For a chef’s kiss, you bring the tips of your fingers together, kiss them, and then open your hand. Nothing close to that movement was visible in the FvD member’s video, the newspaper wrote.
A spokesperson for the national FvD also maintains that his party colleague did not make a white supremacist gesture. “The video has been taken offline to prevent it from being misinterpreted,” he said in a written response.
The party also denied it when an FvD member in Velsen made the white power sign at the Christmas gala of JFVD, the party’s youth movement. Various right-wing extremists from the Netherlands and abroad attended the gala. That party member is now a municipal councilor in Velsen for the FvD.
Before the municipal election in March, the Volkskrant discovered that multiple FvD candidates had ties with right-wing extremist organizations. Lidewij de Vos, who succeeded Thierry Baudet as FvD’s leader in parliament in September, eventually responded to this in a video message. She said that FvD candidates had made “inappropriate jokes” or had been “briefly” members of “a rather reprehensible organization” in the distant past.
