By Monica Showalter
Geert Wilders, who won a blowout parliamentary race in the Netherlands last week, gaining 37 seats, is primarily viewed through the prism of his opposition to Islamist immigration, which has been creating problems in his home country.
His victory was bad news for Hamas, the Taliban, ISIS, assorted Jihadis, and masses of would-be rapists, loafers, and crimigrants who view the Netherlands as a fine harvest.
But there’s another group that fared just as badly — the greenie fanatics, who seek to create a “net zero emissions” society — by any means necessary. That means an increasingly oppressive, coercive and extractive state. They are all in on shutting down and expropriating farms, and driving energy prices through the roof as well as putting the manacles on industry through draconian regulation.
Their leader, Frans Timmermans, was widely expected to win the election, and got the surprise of his life with the news that his biggest nghtmare, Geert Wilders instead had come out on top — and that voters had sent him packing.
Now it’s panic time.
According to Spiked:
One of the big losers of this week’s Dutch elections, in which right-winger Geert Wilders romped to victory, was Frans Timmermans, leader of a newly formed alliance of the Labour and Green parties. Timmermans is best known internationally as the former vice-president of the European Commission, where he was the architect and face of the EU’s flagship climate policy, the European Green Deal. To fans, he was hailed as the EU’s ‘climate pope’. Yet it is no exaggeration to say his stringent climate targets are set to impoverish Europe.
It seems the European mainstream media are finally taking note of the disastrous consequences of Timmermans’s Net Zero zealotry. Last week, Politico warned that his EU climate policies could be about to set off a wave of deindustrialisation on a scale we haven’t seen in 50 years.
The report asked the question: ‘Does the architect of Europe’s Green Deal truly understand what he’s unleashed?’ The answer can only be a resounding ‘Yes’.
Timmermans is no ordinary tree-hugging green with some tree spikes in his pocket. He’s an establishment green, a greenie with a draconian Klaus Schwab-style agenda seeking to destroy capitalism and progress in the name of going green, and forcing subsistence poverty onto previously prosperous societies.
He was the right hand man of sanctimonious European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, and bore the extended title of Executive Vice President of the European Commission for the European Green Deal, as well as the European Commissioner for Climate Action. Fancy titles like that made him a ‘let them eat bugs’ kind of guy.
Spiked notes that he was a pretty merciless one:
One of Timmermans’s flagship policies is the EU’s Nature Restoration Law, which formally demands that countries restore, by 2030, at least 30 per cent of poor-condition agricultural land, peatlands, forests, rivers and ‘marine habitats such as seagrasses or sediment bottoms’. That requirement then rises to 90 per cent by 2050. [Big corporations are fans.] The problem with this scheme is that it will significantly reduce the land available to farmers. It is this type of measure that has led to recent protests not just in Timmermans’s home country of the Netherlands, but also in Italy.
Timmermans hasn’t just confined himself to wreaking havoc in agriculture – he’s also taken aim at the automotive industry. Under him, the European Commission has required that makers of new city buses switch to 100 per cent zero-emissions vehicles by 2030, and that manufacturers of new lorries meet ever more demanding targets.
The list goes on, all of his greenie hobbyhorses utter crushers for working people.
Spiked sums him up for what this nasty character stands for:
The truth is that Timmermans is simply indifferent to deindustrialisation in the EU. Indeed, as noted in Politico, he ‘has been candid about the cost of his revolution’ and has warned that ‘the journey will be harder on some than on others’. Back in 2020, Timmermans admitted to the European Parliament that his wild goose chase for Net Zero would be ‘bloody hard’.
He’s an EU and Klaus Schwab loyalist, not a loyalist to the Netherlands. Ruling that country would be all about imposing their green agenda on the Dutch as a conquered people, not serving as their leader.
Any questions as to why this human nightmare lost his election? He gained a few seats in his broad leftist coalation, but nothing like what Wilders gained.
Now it’s panic time for the green left as their green agenda heads for the compost pile with Wilders. That’s a good thing.
Which suggests that maybe immigration so loudly touted by the press wasn’t the biggest key issue among voters, though I am sure it was uite strong.
With Timmermans and his greenie diktat agenda standing on the other side of Wilders, it’s quite likely that the green agenda was what drove the Dutch to vote for Wilders. Wilders did experience a sharp surge at the last minute in voter support, which explains why his victory was such as surprise.
It may have come down to this guy being green and oppressive and determined to make a hash of the Dutch economy which did it.
Republicans in the states should take note of the green havoc Joe Biden’s comparable straitjacket policies have caused in the U.S., and hammer him on that for all it’s worth, too. Greenism is at least as potent as illegal migration for patriots and populists determined to beat back the left.