The leader of the insurgent pro-farmer party that shook the foundations of Dutch politics said that she believes the coalition government is not on firm ground and that she expects elections within the year.
Following her first meeting with Prime Minister Mark Rutte after last week’s shock elections, Farmer–Citizen Movement (BBB) leader Caroline van der Plas, said: “I feel that Rutte has listened. Whether he also heard what I said, we’ll see.”
The plain-speaking half-Irish former journalist turned political insurgent said that the four-party coalition forming Rutte’s government, which saw their seats in the 75-member senate fall from 32 to 22, is likely to break apart, the Rotterdam-based newspaper Algemeen Dagblad reported.
Indeed, CDA leader and cabinet member Wopke Hoekstra has already signally a potential break from the government on the controversial EU-driven nitrogen fertiliser reforms that spurred the BBB party to victory last week.
Van Der Plas said: “I expect the situation to simply become unsustainable within the coalition and that there will be new elections before the end of the year.”
The dividing lines between the pro-farmer party, which looks set to secure an astonishing 17 seats in the Senate, which would make it the largest single party in the house, and the globalist government of Mark Rutte — the country’s longest-serving pm — centres around the Great Reset-style agenda that would see the government forcibly buy-out farmers and the 2030 deadline for cutting half of the nation’s nitrogen emissions.
Despite months of farmers staging protests with their tractors across the country, the Rutte government said in November that it was planning on buying out between two and three thousand farms with a one-off payment, by force if necessary, as soon as April of this year. The globalist government has claimed that it is necessary in order to comply with the EU’s Natura 2000 scheme, which sets out swathes of wildlife-protected zones across the bloc, many of which happen to be in areas of heavy farming.
Those farms that aren’t forcibly taken over by the state would still be in jeopardy under the plans, given that they would still need to cut their emissions of nitrogen, a key fertiliser for many farmers, by between 50 and 95 per cent by the year 2030, which many farmers have argued that they cannot afford and would likely go under financially.
Van der Plas said that she does not believe Rutte will backtrack on the agenda, but commented “I do hope that the seed is planted and will grow a bit.”
“The time of ignoring and keeping BBB small is over. We have become a serious interlocutor.” she continued. “Words are beautiful, but deeds count.”
The next move on the agenda for the Farmer–Citizen Movement leader will be to seek a meeting with European Commission vice president Frans Timmermans, to see “what is possible” in terms of negotiating the fertiliser restrictions. Rutte’s government has consistently argued that there was no room for negotiation and that if it failed to enact the agenda, the EU would impose penalties on The Netherlands, particularly in the form of banning new construction sites.
Van der Plas has argued that the government could enact emergency legislation to prevent this from happening, given that the “country is completely locked up socio-economically and socially”.
The farmers may also argue to the Eurocrats in Brussels that given the food crisis as a result of the war in Ukraine, it may be foolhardy to try to shut down fertile farmlands in The Netherlands, which is currently the largest exporter of meat in Europe and the fifth largest dairy exporter globally.