Government will not label antifa a terrorist organisation

The Jetten cabinet will not designate the political protest group “antifa” as a terrorist organisation, justice minister David van Weel told parliament on Friday, saying there is no factual basis for the move.

In a letter to MPs, the VVD minister wrote that the legal threshold for placing a group on the national terrorism sanctions list was not met, because no Dutch authority has evidence that antifa is a centralised organisation. Only a court can declare an organisation terrorist under criminal law, he added.

The letter is the cabinet’s long-awaited formal response to a parliamentary motion passed by a narrow majority in September last year, days after US president Donald Trump announced he would designate antifa a “domestic terrorist organization”.

The motion came from far-right Forum voor Democratie leader Lidewij de Vos, anti-immigration PVV leader Geert Wilders and farmers’ party BBB leader Caroline van der Plas, and was supported by the right-wing liberal VVD, JA21 and SGP. Then-prime minister Dick Schoof had advised against it.

D66 and CDA – Van Weel’s coalition partners in the Jetten cabinet, which took office in February – both voted against the motion, and the VVD’s own youth wing JOVD called it “completely unfeasible and undemocratic” at the time.

A label, not an organisation

Antifa is not a formal organisation but a loose label for various forms of anti-fascist activism. The national counter-terrorism agency NCTV has consistently described organised left-wing extremism in the Netherlands as small in scale and ideologically fragmented.

The motion drew sharp criticism from terrorism scholars Edwin Bakker and Beatrice de Graaf of Leiden University, who told the Volkskrant that designating a loose movement as terrorist ran against 50 years of Dutch counter-terrorism policy.

In November the US State Department went further than Trump’s general designation by formally listing four specific European antifa-affiliated groups – including Germany’s Antifa Ost – as foreign terrorist organisations.