Leadership Quote by Gijs de Vries

The line leans on a familiar post-9/11 political alchemy: turn voting into a form of frontline courage, and democracy into a rebuttal delivered with ink-stained fingers. By opening with “Look at Iraq; look at Afghanistan,” de Vries isn’t inviting nuanced comparison so much as staging an evidentiary tableau. Two war zones become proof-points, compressed into a single moral lesson: if people can vote under threat, then the democratic project must be both legitimate and winning.

The key rhetorical move is the phrase “great personal physical risk.” It elevates the act of voting from civic routine to bodily sacrifice, borrowing the emotional authority of the soldier and handing it to the civilian voter. That’s powerful because it makes abstention feel like complicity and participation feel like resistance. Then comes the named antagonist: “Bin Laden and his allies.” This is not just about turnout; it’s about turnout as a referendum on terrorism itself. The subtext is strategic: Western-led state-building and security interventions are framed less as contested geopolitics and more as a moral contest in which the ballot box is the battlefield.

Context matters: as a European politician associated with counterterrorism and security discourse, de Vries is speaking to an audience anxious about whether liberal democracy can defend itself without becoming what it fights. The quote offers reassurance by outsourcing legitimacy to “people” risking their lives, even as it quietly sidesteps the harder questions those elections raised - coercion, sectarian power, occupation, and whether participation signals endorsement or simply survival. In that ambiguity, the line does its real work: it turns complexity into a clean story of defiance.