The Dutch farmers’ revolt

The farmers revolted on October 1st 2019. That day, a 15-year-old schoolboy named Björn Schütte was sitting in front of the TV at his home in Emmen, a small town in the Dutch countryside. He watched in amazement as hundreds of tractors rolled into The Hague, ploughing over fences and snarling traffic for miles around. Enraged by government plans to cut the amount of livestock in the country in half and shut down big farms to get nitrogen emissions in line with European Union regulations, the protesters displayed banners reading “Proud to be a farmer”, “No farmers, no food”, and “Make our agriculture great again”.

Growing up in the agricultural heartland of the Netherlands, Schütte had known a lot of farmers. His grandparents had run a dairy farm, and many of his schoolmates’ parents were also in the profession. He appreciated their industrious, no-nonsense attitude to life.

Supporting farmers used to be a priority for the Dutch government. Through decades of intensive cultivation – encouraged by politicians and backed by generous loans – farmers had transformed the Netherlands into an agricultural powerhouse. It is now the world’s second-biggest exporter of agricultural goods by value, a point of national pride.

As Schütte was growing up, however, concerns about the levels of nitrogen produced by farming were moving up the political agenda. In 2019 the Dutch Supreme Court ordered a drastic reduction in nitrogen emissions. It seemed to people like Schütte that the farmers were being pushed aside.

In the days that followed, farmers continued to block roads throughout the country. In one town, protestors stormed a provincial council building and pelted police officers with straw. Public officials received threats of violence.

The demonstrations seemed to tap into a wellspring of agrarian discontent across the continent. Copycat protests broke out in Berlin, Brussels and Milan. Donald Trump lauded the Dutch farmers for standing up to “climate tyranny”.

Soon after the farmers took to the streets a new political party was founded to channel their anger: The BoerBurgerBeweging (Farmer-Citizen Movement). More simply known as the BBB, it described itself as “the voice of and for the countryside”. Its members called for an end to caps on nitrogen emissions, as well as improvements to rural transport, more house building and the establishment of a Ministry of Rural Affairs to be based outside The Hague, the seat of the Dutch government. In national elections in March 2021, the BBB won a seat in parliament, bringing their perspective – and anger – to the national stage.

Schütte had been one of the earliest members of the BBB. Soon after he joined, the party sent him an email, looking for candidates to stand in local elections in early 2023. He applied to stand in Drenthe, his province, and, to his surprise, the party said yes. At the time, he wasn’t even old enough to vote. But he waged a spirited campaign, distributing flyers while working as a pizza-delivery boy and hanging a massive banner over the main stairway at his school (teachers made him take it down).

Before the election nobody thought the BBB would grab more than a few of the 43 council seats in Schütte’s province. Instead, they won over a third, more than the next six parties combined. Schütte, now 19, found himself a sitting member of the provincial council. Similar results played out all over the Netherlands. The BBB became the biggest party in every one of the country’s 12 provinces.

Despite these successes, the BBB has yet to prove itself as a political force on a national level. This July, however, the centre-right government collapsed over an immigration debate. On November 22nd snap elections will be held, pitting the BBB and an array of other right-leaning parties against a left-wing coalition led by Frans Timmermans, a former EU climate tsar.

The BBB’s electoral fortunes will provide one answer to an increasingly important question: how can Europe manage the green transition without provoking a populist backlash?

In August I got the train to Deventer, a town of red-brick Hanseatic-era buildings and cobbled streets in central Netherlands. I was there to meet Caroline van der Plas, the party’s leader and the holder of its first seat in parliament.

Like many of the BBB’s politicians, Van der Plas, 56, is not a farmer herself, though she has long been involved with the Netherlands’ agriculture sector. She began her career as a journalist covering the meat industry for a trade magazine, then moved into public-relations work on behalf of a variety of agricultural organisations, including the Dutch Association of Pig Producers, giving her a keen sense of the frustration that farmers felt as a consequence of the country’s environmental policies. Growing convinced that farmers would be better off founding their own party, she teamed up with two other agricultural marketing professionals, and founded the BBB in 2019.

She had an eye for spectacle: on her first day in parliament, she rode in on a tractor. The Dutch media took to her immediately, and her bright-green nail polish soon became a familiar sight on TV news programmes. She pulled at heartstrings with tales of farmers’ woe and talked movingly about losing her husband to cancer.

The BBB’s offices are located a 20-minute bicycle ride out of town, above a suburban veterinary clinic. A smiling cardboard cut-out of Van der Plas stands near the door, along with a colourful cow statue, and an old milk churn converted into a donation box.

Van der Plas greeted me warmly. She was eager to correct the popular perception of the BBB as a party that only cared about – and appealed to – farmers. “We’re a broad political party,” she said. “But the only time journalists call me is when it’s about farmers. So you get the image of a farmers’ party. I don’t want to blame the media for that, but…”

I pointed out that “farmer” was in their name.

“Yes, but the word ‘citizen’ is also in the name,” she said. Farms do not operate in isolation, she told me. They employ drivers, butchers, builders, electricians and plumbers. Floats for Carnival, a festival in the country’s south and east, are often built in barns. “The way we always put it is that every farmer keeps 12 people at work,” Van der Plas said.

The BBB’s concerns about cultural traditions and rural identity are shared with those further to the right. So far, though, the BBB has eschewed the nativism and Euroscepticism of Party for Freedom, the stridently anti-Islam party led by Geert Wilders, and the even more extreme Forum for Democracy.

I asked Van der Plas whether she might be willing to enter into a coalition with such far-right parties to advance the BBB’s interests. Although she said she disagreed with them on subjects such as freedom of religion, she wouldn’t rule out working with anyone. By ignoring their supporters, she said, “You’re telling those voters, ‘Your vote is worth nothing to us’”.

As Van der Plas showed me to the door, I looked out of the window at the farm next door and asked if the owner was a BBB supporter. “Probably,” she said, and laughed. I cycled over to the main barn and called to see if anyone was there. A man who looked to be in his 60s emerged, wearing mud-splattered overalls. I asked him whether he intended to vote for Van der Plas. Yes, he said. “We need her.”

Earlier this autumn I met Schütte at the provincial council building in Drenthe. He said he was enjoying his new role, and told me about the coalition the BBB had agreed to with the main centre-right and centre-left parties. “That was very fun, to be involved in the part you normally only see on TV,” he said.

Despite Schütte’s enthusiasm, the party’s attempts at governing have yielded mixed results. Four years after it was established, the BBB had managed to form governing coalitions in ten out of 12 provinces. In each one, the coalition agreements refused to commit to a reduction in nitrogen emissions by the deadline of 2030 – the government has now dropped this goal because of the opposition. But critics have alleged that the party has made too many concessions, a failing some have attributed to its inexperienced politicians.

Although Van der Plas had been at pains to stress that the BBB was a party for everyone, critics say it’s still not clear what it actually stands for, beyond support for farmers. Its policies are a jumble of left-wing and right-wing ideas: refugee quotas, the expansion of nuclear power, a minimum-wage increase and higher taxes on the very rich. And many members skirt close to conspiratorialism about vaccines and climate change.

Schütte took me to the hall of the council building to watch the day’s proceedings. Several dozen representatives sat debating the funding of traditional festivities. Jur Faber, an avuncular man with a white moustache and reading glasses, who represented the left-wing Party for the Animals, which campaigns for animal rights, had the floor. “It’s my view that not all traditions should be preserved,” he said.

One of Schütte’s colleagues in the BBB, a stout balding man with round glasses named Gert Veltrop, seemed to take issue with this. “Does that include Easter bonfires and carbide shooting?” he asked. On New Year’s Eve, some people in the rural Netherlands stuff calcium carbide – a chemical compound used in steelmaking and carbide lamps – into a milk churn and ignite it, firing footballs and other projectiles into the air.

Faber weighed in on the much-loved but dangerous tradition. “Carbide shooting is actually a tradition that comes from chasing away evil spirits. I have the impression that more and more evil spirits are coming into the world, and so it doesn’t seem to have actually helped us.”

A lively debate followed. A young member of the Green party asked the BBB representative if he might be willing to consider “evolving” new, less harmful holiday traditions. Chris Truong, an equally youthful member of a far-right party, took the BBB’s side against the modernisers. “Archery was started by medieval kings to keep a standing army. Should we ban archery, too?”

The BBB has capitalised on debates like this, which are intensely local in nature and less abstract than things like carbon emission or geopolitics. Afterwards I caught up with Schütte’s colleague, Veltrop. He too was not a farmer, but worked in a nursing home in Emmen, Schütte’s hometown. He seemed irked by the debate.

“You don’t make traditions. They already exist,” he said. This sort of thinking was the reason people turned to the BBB, he said. “The other parties mostly only have climate effects and everything around pollution in mind,” he said. “They completely forgot the human part.”

By successfully stoking anti-establishment grievances, the BBB’s success has inspired copycats. The New Social Contract (NSC) is a recently established centre-right party that campaigns on rural issues and attracts many of the same voters as the BBB. Since the NSC’s formation in August, the BBB has dropped from the top of the polls to a distant fourth or fifth, threatening to leave it exactly where it wanted to avoid ending up – as a party just for farmers.

But the dynamics that fuelled the BBB’s shock victory in March are not going away, whether or not it is Van der Plas and her party that reap the votes. The debates around what we should give up to live in a less environmentally destructive way will become only more volatile as global warming gets worse. Migrants will not stop moving and cities will not stop growing.

Schütte has watched many of his friends and acquaintances leave their small town for life in one of the big cities. With each departure, he feels like his own community is a little closer to collapsing. “To have them disappear, the character of the Netherlands disappears. That’s what makes us different as a country from other countries. I mean, if you stretch this out on a longer timeline, if the current trend continues, in a hundred years the Netherlands will just be one big metropolitan area.” Schütte paused. “And that would be a disaster, if you ask me.” ■

Alex Dziadosz is a writer based in Berlin

IMAGES: Getty