Far-right MP Pepijn van Houwelingen has been given a suspended €450 fine for “inciting intolerance” by posting a mocked-up image on social media of two ministers posing with a Nazi flag.

The Form voor Democratie MP tweeted the doctored photograph of social affairs minister Karien van Gennip and health minister Ernst Kuipers in September 2022 as part of his party’s conspiracy-driven campaign against coronavirus restrictions.

In the original image Kuipers was raising the flag of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals while Van Gennip looked on.

The district court in The Hague told Van Houwelingen, 44, that he would have to pay the fine if he reoffended within a year.

Judges said that while it was “extremely important” for politicians to be able to criticise each other’s policies in public, they also had a “responsibility to prevent the dissemination of statments that incite intolerance.”

Prosecutors had asked for the fine to be imposed immediately, but the court took into account the fact that Van Houwelingen deleted the tweet after the ministers objected to it.

The MP said in court that on reflection, his tweet was “clumsy from a political perspective”, but he was voicing concern about the “totalitarian” and “utopian” ideals of the UN rather than accusing the two ministers of being Nazis.

But afterwards he described the court’s decision as “unsettling”. “This is very clearly a verdict intended to silence the opposition,” he said.