Just three weeks before elections to the EU parliament, in which the non-establishment Right is expected to do well, there will not be a lot of joy within the EU Commission that the Dutch may be about to have a government dominated by parties of that type, a mere six months after the country’s election (forming governments can take a while in the Hague). Geert Wilders, the leader of the PVV, the party of the populist Right that topped the poll, realized some time ago that, given how controversial a figure he is, it would be impossible to assemble a governing coalition if the PVV insisted on him being prime minister. That sacrifice paid off, as did other concessions made by his party (which is very much his party).
The new government will be a coalition between the PVV, the VVD (a consistently disappointing party of the center Right, which led the last government), and two new parties — the NSC, a, roughly speaking, Christian Democratic party, and the BBB, a farmers’ party formed in reaction to the threat farmers faced from EU eco-regulation. As of the time of writing, it’s still not known who the prime minister will be.
The road ahead for the new coalition won’t be straightforward, to put it mildly, due both to differences between its members and the prospect of a clash with the EU, above all over migration and green policies, where the new government’s policies are certain to take it into areas in which Brussels is supposed to have the final say.
Matthew Lynn, writing in the Daily Telegraph:
Electric car subsidies will be scrapped, while heat pumps will no longer be mandatory. “Red diesel” [a type of fuel used in the construction and farming sectors] will be brought back for farmers, and restrictions on agriculture will be eased – a significant issue for a country that is one of the largest food exporters in the world by value.
On energy, the Netherlands will switch to nuclear power, starting work on four new reactors, alongside encouraging fresh development of offshore gas production.
It will cut taxes for businesses, including a levy on share buybacks, while plans for a rise in the carbon tax will be cancelled.
And on immigration, Wilders has promised the “strictest asylum policy ever”.
In the coalition agreement, it is specified that the new government will respect “existing agreements” on climate policy, but it also contains a warning that “if we don’t achieve the goals, we will make alternative policies,” a promise, effectively, of conflict to come.
As I noted back in November, Wilders has been far more “understanding” of Putin than he should have been (especially given the downing of the Malaysian flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine by Russia or its proxies, which claimed the lives of nearly 200 Dutch passengers). But, as I also noted, the excommunicated (and that is certainly the way that Wilders has been treated) can end up turning to highly undesirable company, something that Putin knows how to exploit. It was thus good to see that the coalition agreement specifies that the Netherlands will continue to support Ukraine and will legally commit itself to spend at least 2 percent of GDP on defense, a level the Dutch have, shamefully, yet to reach.
DW reports that Frans Timmermans, the leader of the alliance between the Dutch Labour party and the Greens at the last election, has described it as “worrisome” that “a radical right-wing party under Wilders . . . finds itself at the center of power in the Netherlands.” Well, it was more than a little “worrisome” that, as the EU’s commissioner for climate action, Timmermans had shown himself to be an extremist, so much so that he was not prepared to let a little matter like Beijing’s genocide of the Uyghur people get in the way of Brussels’ efforts to partner with China on climate policy.
That Wilders’s ascendancy owes a great deal to the EU establishment’s handling of migration, multiculturalism, and, now, environmentalism does not seem to concern Timmermans. And that helps explain why Wilders has gotten as far as he has.