Dutch farmers’ protest party suffers embarrassment over neo-Nazi tweets

The Dutch farmers’ protest party, BBB, has suffered a serious embarrassment just weeks from its first general election with the revelation that one of its promising young candidates sent threatening neo-Nazi tweets to politicians – including prime minister Mark Rutte – during the coronavirus pandemic.

Having initially denied any involvement in roughly 900 abusive tweets sent anonymously over two years from the Twitter account Verzet op Links (Resistance on the Left), Jasper Rekers (35) did a U-turn when the BBB was informed, admitted he was the tweets’ author and withdrew his candidacy.

At the height of the pandemic in the Netherlands, some extreme anti-vaxxers warned pro-vaccination politicians that they would be subject to punishment by a post-second World War Nuremberg-style tribunal when the pandemic ended, and this was broadly the dark theme of many of the tweets.

A prime target for Mr Rekers’s wrath was Hugo de Jonge, health minister during the pandemic, who was described as “a child molester”. It was also suggested repeatedly that Mr De Jonge had “booked a one-way trip to Nuremberg”.

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Mr Rekers described Ernst Kuipers, a medical professor who succeeded Mr De Jonge as health minister, as “a child abuser”, “a war criminal” and “a pimp”.

When Turkish MP Nilüfer Gündoğan posted photographs of herself being vaccinated with the aim of encouraging the public, including ethnic groups, to do the same, Mr Rekers called her “a pharma whore”.

He described D66 MP Rob Jettens, recently appointed party leader, as “a Nazi bitch”, compared party chairman Jan Paternotte to the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, and dubbed the annual D66 party congress “the fascists’ ball”.

When Mr Rutte congratulated German chancellor Olaf Scholz on taking office, Mr Rekers tagged Mr Rutte “an NSBer”, meaning a member of the former Dutch Nazi party, banned in 1945.

Mr Rekers is a business consultant who teaches “digital intelligence” at a college of applied sciences in Deventer, which says it’s “shocked” at the revelations. “There has been contact with him,” it said. “A conversation with his manager will follow soon.”

For the BBB (BoerBurgerBeweging/Farmer-Citizen Protest Party), the revelations are all the more embarrassing because its founder, Caroline van der Plas, has advocated more “politeness” in the party in order to “improve confidence” in politics.

A spokesperson for the party said it too had been “deeply shocked” to learn of the tweets.

The spokesperson confirmed that Mr Rekers had apologised and was standing down as a candidate, adding: “From what he told us, this was a dark period in his life.”

The Dutch parliament broke on Friday for the election on November 22nd.

Latest polling puts the BBB, which scored a landslide victory in regional elections, in fourth place – behind the Liberals, the Labour-GreenLeft Alliance, and New Social Contract, all neck and neck.