The tide looks to be going out for agrarian populists in the Netherlands as recent polling shows the Dutch Farmers Movement (BBB) collapsing in the polls two months before national elections, as EU-backed Greens look to steady the boat on populist discontent.
The BBB was only founded in 2019 and, energised by the Netherlands’ running battle over the imposition of nitrogen quotas on the country’s agricultural sector, came in first in last March’s regional elections.
The Netherlands’ conservative government unexpectedly collapsed over an asylum dispute last July, precipitating snap elections scheduled for late November where it was originally thought that the BBB could transpose their local results to the Dutch Parliament.
Not so, as the BBB has seen its support halved since May, down to 11%, according to the latest opinion polls as the protest movement that catapulted the party to prominence stalled.
Fresh from its success, the farmer’s movement in the Netherlands has suffered from stagnation as more radical farmers around the activist Van den Oever look to form a more radical vehicle citing reformism within the BBB.
Many regard the farmer’s movement as temporarily occupying space once held by the traditional Dutch centre-right. BBB leader Caroline van der Plas reached out to disgruntled Christian Democratic politicians to join the party, angering many radicals.
In the face of a retreating populism, Dutch politics are witnessing an enhanced effort to defend green policies and the wider European Green Deal: former Brussels green czar Frans Timmermans resigned from EU politics to combat the BBB at home, as voters lash out against green policies he engineered.
Timmermans is leading a green-left electoral alliance against the BBB and other populists that is currently in third place in opinion polls, at 15%, against the flatlining agrarian populists. The green-left alliance proposed even more drastic cuts to livestock production—including a 75% cut in the number of live animals on Dutch farms—crucial, they believe, to stopping climate change.
It would appear, however, that a rebranded group of Christian Democrats, the New Social Contract (NCS) led by Pieter Omtzigt, is ahead in polling, as mainstream Dutch politics gains the upper hand on what increasingly looks like a flash-in-the-pan populist outburst.
