“T HE OWL of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk,” announced Thierry Baudet, leader of the Netherlands’ new Forum for Democracy ( F v D ) party, after the country’s provincial elections on March 20th. The two-year-old F v D had just shocked the establishment, winning the most votes of any party nation-wide and becoming the largest in several provincial legislatures. Dutch voters whose Hegel was shaky turned to Google to work out what the Eurosceptic, climate-change-sceptic foe of immigration was on about, and concluded that he was proclaiming the election a dialectical shift in Dutch history.

Combined with fashion-model looks, such stunts have made Mr Baudet the hottest political news in the Netherlands. In his first appearance as an MP in 2017, he violated parliamentary rules by trying to make a speech in Latin. Many compare his rise to that of Pim Fortuyn, the similarly debonair anti-Muslim professor and politician who was assassinated in 2002. Unlike Geert Wilders, the Netherlands’ other anti-immigrant populist, Mr Baudet campaigns among younger and better-educated voters, staging open forums on right-wing philosophy. But of the major parties, only Mr Wilders’s had a lower education level. Almost all had switched from other right-wing parties. Rather than leading a revolution, Mr Baudet may simply be replacing Mr Wilders as the Netherlands’ main right-wing populist.

“The real story of the elections is the Dutchification of politics, the complete levelling and splintering of the party landscape,” says Tom van der Meer of the University of Amsterdam. The F v D came first, but won just 15% of the vote, compared with 14% for the Liberals and 11% for the GreenLeft party. The country now has 13 parties represented in parliament.

The F v D ’s new delegates in provincial legislatures will vote in May to choose the country’s Senate, parliament’s less powerful arm. The F v D will probably get 13 of the 75 senators, depriving the ruling coalition of a majority.

Paradoxically, this could force the government to move left, co-operating with GreenLeft or the Labour party. It is trying to pass energy legislation to meet the country’s commitments under the Paris climate-change treaty. Mr Baudet has claimed the measures would cost a trillion euros over several decades; independent experts put the figure at €3bn-4bn ($3.4bn-4.5bn) per year by 2030.