The shock among the Dutch chattering classes on 16 March was palpable. The right-populist Farmer–Citizen Movement (BBB) – established in 2019 by a small communications firm, bankrolled by the powerful Dutch agrifood complex and led by a former journalist for the meat industry – had in one go massively increased its vote share in the country’s provincial elections. It is now the largest party in all twelve provinces, and expected to achieve the same status in Senate in April. This would give BBB huge veto power at both national and local levels, potentially bringing an already hesitant green transition programme to a standstill. Faced with this prospect, an irate commentariat has begun to denounce the farmers as enemies of green progress, and speculate that voting restrictions – on the elderly, the lower educated, those in rural constituencies – might be necessary to override their resistance.

The casus belli for the farmers’ revolt was a 2019 ruling by the Dutch Supreme Court that the government had breached its EU obligations to protect 163 natural areas against emissions from nearby agricultural activities. This prompted the centre-right coalition government, led by Mark Rutte, to impose a nationwide speed limit of 100 km/h on highways and cancel a wide array of building projects intended to alleviate supply shortages on the Dutch housing market. Yet it soon became apparent that such measures could only be a short-term stopgap, since transport and construction contributed a pittance to national nitrogen emissions while agriculture made up a whopping 46%. A structural solution would therefore have to involve a substantial reduction of livestock. The suggestion long put forward by the peripheral ‘Party for the Animals’, to slash half of the aggregate Dutch livestock by expropriating 500 to 600 major emitters, was suddenly on the table. The unthinkable had become thinkable.

The number of Dutch workers employed in agricultural activities has declined precipitously since 1945, from around 40% during the Great War to only 2% today. Yet, over the same period, the Netherlands has become the second biggest food exporter in the world after the US. Its highly capitalized meat and dairy industry plays a pivotal role in global supply chains, which makes its ecological footprint unsustainably large. Hence the gradual realization among the Dutch political class – accelerated by the Supreme Court ruling – that meeting climate goals meant reorienting the national economy. For the rural and small-town oriented Christian Democrats in the coalition that was hard to swallow; for the eco-modernist, meritocratic social liberals in the coalition (D66) this came naturally; while for Mark Rutte’s own People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, even though naturally in favor of ‘growth’, it was simply the pragmatic thing to do. As one centrist MP remarked, ‘The Netherlands can’t be the country that feeds the world while at the same time shitting itself.’

These green proposals triggered a wave of farmer protests – farmers blocking roads with their tractors, occupying squares and other public spaces, breaking into government buildings and turning up at the homes of politicians – as well as the formation of the BBB. After a brief pause during lockdown, the movement has now reached new levels of intensity. Since spring 2022, along the roads and highways leading into the forgotten parts of the Netherlands, farmers have hung innumerable inverted national flags: a symbol of their discontent, sprouting up like mushrooms after an autumnal shower.

Almost one fifth of the electorate, approximately 1.4 million people, turned out to vote for the BBB – a significantly larger number than the 180.000 farmers who comprise its core constituency. This suggests that more is at stake here than simple nimbyism. Pensioners, the vocationally trained and the precariously employed are overrepresented among the BBB’s supporters, and its largest electoral gains were in peripheral, non-urban areas which have been hit by falling public investment over a long time. Such groups have rallied around a class of farmers who present themselves as victims, but who are in fact among the most wealthy and politically well-connected in the country: one in five of them is a millionaire. It is clear that this heterogeneous bloc could only be assembled as a result of deep disenchantment with mainstream politics in the Netherlands – which has long been blighted by the arrogance and incompetence of its ruling stratum.

A number of historical factors laid the groundwork for the farmers’ movement. First, the Netherlands underwent an extremely rapid neoliberal makeover since the early 1980s, resulting in the fire sale of public services, the marketization of childcare, healthcare and higher education, a steep decline in social housing, the emergence of globalized banks and pension funds, and one of the most flexible labour markets in the EU, with one in three employees on precarious contracts. Next, the 2008 financial crisis led to one of the most expensive banking rescues in per capita terms, followed by six years of austerity which punished the poor and served to redistribute wealth from everyone else to the rich. The four lockdowns imposed between 2020 and 2022 had the same effect: workers lost their jobs, saw their incomes fall and died in greater numbers. Rising consumer prices, sparked by the war in Ukraine, subsequently pushed many Dutch households in the provinces into fuel poverty.

All this was interspersed with constant bureaucratic failures across a range of government departments: childcare, primary education, housing, the tax office, transport and gas extraction. At the same time, regressive subsidies were handed out to middle-class environmentalists to reimburse heat pumps, solar panels and Teslas, which of course only they could pre-finance. Add a constant trickle of high-handed insults about the lower classes from the putative experts who dominate public debate, and you end up with a festering and combustible mixture of resentments. The situation was finally ignited in 2019 by the mentioned court ruling, after which latent regional-cultural identifications of the provinces against the city (the ‘Randstad’, the Western urban conurbation that accommodates circa half the Dutch population) provided the raw symbolic material for the farmers’ adversarial narrative: core versus periphery, elites versus masses, vegans versus meat-eaters. With the help of some savvy political entrepreneurs, this message began to resonate far beyond the farmlands.

The French writer Houellebecq once wrote that the Netherlands is not a country but a limited liability corporation. It perfectly captures the view of Mark Rutte’s People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy. For thirteen years now it has reimagined the Netherlands as a European Singapore on the Rhine. It is a form of mercantilist neoliberalism that aims to attract as much foreign capital, both financial and human, to the Netherlands as possible. The tax rule book is arranged with that goal in mind, transforming the Netherlands into one of the largest tax havens in the world. The social security regime has been redesigned to serve highly educated expats, turning the city of Amsterdam into an Anglophone outpost where shopping and dining requires one to speak English, while refugees and asylum seekers are locked away near some of the poorest villages in the Dutch outback. Public investment has been rechanneled into the shiny metropolitan areas in the West, while largely surpassing the peripheries along the German border. Last week it took me nearly four hours to go from Arnhem to Veenhuizen in the North of the Netherlands by public transportation, a distance of less than hundred miles.

As in the UK where everything goes to London and the home counties, this was legitimated by the mercantilist narrative of the triumph of the city and the creative class, peddled by hip geographers like Richard Florida and Edward Glazer, that told post-ideological, neoliberal politicians to stop backing losers and start picking winners and steer massive amounts of public funding to cities. For that is where human capital resides, so the story goes, and that is what is key to national economic success. And so it went: while hospitals, schools, fire stations and bus lines slowly but gradually disappeared from the periphery, the metropolitan core was sprinkled with massive public investments in glittering metro lines etc, Amsterdam on top.

The one that has overseen it all, Mark Rutte, who is in the race to become the longest sitting head of state in the two hundred years history of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, fits to a tee with the reckless opportunists so wonderfully described  by the New Zealand sociologist Aeron Davies (2018): Rutte is the ultimate expert in surviving the political game but totally lacks the vision that is required in times of crisis. In fact, Mark Rutte famously quipped that voters who want vision should better go to an optometrist.

The disaffection of a growing slice of the electorate is not a performative effect of media framing, as some maintain, but is based in real, material neglect. As was hammered home two days after the election results came in by a report from one of the Dutch public think tanks: there are large discrepancies in life expectancy between core and the periphery of the country as well as huge gaps in terms of wellbeing and trust in politicians (2013). The report concluded that this was the unintended effect of decades of underinvestment in the provinces: the places that, in the worldview of people like Mark Rutte, do not matter

Demography, balanced budgets, the euro, Covid-19, war, climate change: these are the imponderabilia that centrist politicians, backed by their battery of experts, have used to discipline voters into submission. Nitrogen emissions fit seamlessly into this technocratic pattern. The plan to halve livestock numbers in the Netherlands was not drawn up after a lengthy process of democratic debate; it was a summary decision made by politicians hiding behind an unaccountable judiciary and a set of scientific numbers.

Hence, it may be necessary to revise the famous observation by the German poet Heinrich Heine: ‘In Holland, everything happens fifty years late’. Here, it seems, the backlash against the green technocracy has come early (though France’s yellow vests had been there already). The Dutch (and French) conjuncture foreshadows the fate of other countries in the global north – as centrist governments, striving to assert their green credentials, begin to make heavy-handed policy reforms with major redistributive consequences. This, after forty years of neoliberal upward redistribution, and in a situation where governing elites in the preceding decade had already felt very uncertain in the face of the ‘populist’ revolts.

What Andreas Malm (2016)calls the ‘energetic regime’ of global capitalism has so far taken up most of our political attention; but as the environmental fallout of its ‘caloric regime’ becomes impossible to ignore, livestock farming (among other forms of industrial agriculture) will enter the crosshairs of governments and climate activists. Recent data from Eurostat show that livestock densities are particularly high in Denmark, Flanders, Piemonte, Galicia, Brittany, Southern Ireland and Catalonia. Soon enough, these regions will have to introduce measures similar to those currently under discussion in the Netherlands. And if the Dutch case is anything to go by, technocracy will hardly do the trick. A state that has imposed privatization, flexibilization, austerity, disinvestment and regressive environmental subsidies on its citizens for years cannot expect to be trusted when it comes to climate politics. Instead, it will have to redress the ruinous effects of these policies, while slowly building support for the green transition through a process of engagement that does not shy away from democratic disagreement and the hard work that entails.

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Ewald Engelen is professor of financial geography at the University of Amsterdam and a feature writer for De Groene Amsterdammer.

This text first appeared on NLR’s Sidecar (6 April 2023).

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References

Davis, Aeron. 2018. Reckless opportunists: Elites at the end of the Establishment. Manchester: Manchester University Press

Malm, Andreas. 2016. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam power and the Roots of Global Warming. London: Verso.

RLI. 2023. Elke regio telt! Een nieuwe aanpak van verschillen tussen regio’s, https://www.rli.nl/publicaties/2023/advies/elke-regio-telt

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Cite as: Engelen, Ewald 2023. “Another ‘populist’ shake-up in the Netherlands: the BBB revolt” Focaalblog 24 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/04/24/ewald-engelen-another-populist-shake-up-in-the-netherlands-the-bbb-revolt/