Leadership Quote by Gijs de Vries

Optimism here isn’t a mood; it’s a political instrument. Gijs de Vries frames “freedom” not just as a value but as a magnet, a force with gravitational pull strong enough to outcompete “radical fundamentalism.” That choice of language is strategic: it shifts the argument away from policing and punishment and toward legitimacy, belonging, and narrative power. If freedom attracts, then the real contest is for hearts before it’s for borders.

The line also performs a quiet reversal of fear. In the post-9/11 European context de Vries worked in - marked by terrorist attacks, heated debates over immigration, and the EU’s evolving security architecture - “optimistic” reads like a rebuke to panic politics. He’s telling anxious publics: don’t hand extremists the victory of setting the emotional temperature. “What we’ve seen in Europe and the rest of the world” invokes an evidence-based posture without citing specifics, borrowing credibility from history’s broad arc: democratic norms, prosperity, and civil rights outlast ideologies built on coercion.

The subtext is a coalition pitch. To liberals, it reassures that counterterror policy can be anchored in rights rather than permanent exception. To centrists and conservatives, it suggests firmness without fatalism: the threat is real, but it’s not destiny. Still, there’s a rhetorical risk: freedom isn’t automatically attractive to people who experience it as exclusion, surveillance, or hypocrisy. The optimism works because it’s aspirational and performative - a claim that democracies must keep earning the word “freedom” if they want it to win.