Two ministers have filed a complaint with the police against FvD MP Pepijn van Houwelingen over a now-deleted photo showing the pair with a photoshopped Nazi flag.

The original image was a photograph of social affairs minister Karien van Gennip and health minister Ernst Kuipers standing together with the flag of the Sustainable Development Goals. Van Houwelingen’s image was manipulated to show the swastika flag instead.

The Forum for Democracy politician initially defended his Twitter post, but then deleted it.

The ministers say the tweet was slanderous. ‘That flag still evokes a lot of bad memories for a lot of Dutch people. You don’t want to be associated with that,’ Kuipers told reporters.

Van Houwelingen replaced the Nazi image with the two hosting the communist hammer and sickle flag instead. That flag is ‘even more akin to the hammer and sickle of the Communist International than to the swastika,’ he wrote in his post.

D66 MP Jan Paternotte is looking into whether the post violates the rules of parliament, which forbids members from damaging the ‘dignity’ of the institution with their behavior.

Van Houwelingen has been in hot water before. Last year, during a budget debate, he told D66 MP Sjoerd Sjoerdsma ‘Your time will come, because there will be tribunals’ for supporting the government’s pandemic measures.