Nitrogen emissions reduction targets have divided the Dutch population, ushering in an upstart political party and playing a primary role in the ouster of Prime Minister Mark Rutte just days after the shocking collapse of his coalition government.
Rutte, the longest-serving Dutch prime minister and a sharp tactician who has presided over four different governing coalitions, does not appear to have an immediate successor lined up.
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Rutte’s looming vacancy and the waning popularity of his People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy could also clear the way for him to be replaced by someone on the far Right, as growing controversies over migration, farming, and nitrogen emissions reduction targets continue to sow deep divisions among voters.
The Dutch government agreed last summer to comply with the European Union’s nitrate directive, a mandate that requires the country to slash 50% of its nitrogen emissions by 2030 — and which it plans to do primarily by reducing nitrogen-heavy fertilizer deposits on its many livestock farms.
That agreement touched off a massive protest by tens of thousands of Dutch farmers, who massed in the streets to protest the decision, which they decried as unrealistic and unfair, given the country’s status as a farming and agriculture powerhouse.
Roughly 40,000 people took part in the demonstrations, gathering outside government buildings, setting fire to bales of hay, and using their many tractors to block Dutch highways, canals, and warehouses.
The protests all but forced the country’s economy to a standstill — and may have also played a role in reshaping the country’s political tide.
Just months after the summer protests, the Farmers Citizens Movement, a populist, pro-farmer party known by its Dutch acronym of BBB, swept to power in the country’s provincial elections, ultimately gaining enough seats in parliament to put it on par with the left-of-center Labor Party and the Green Party in the Senate.
Leaders of BBB, a party formed only three years earlier, made a name for themselves largely by appealing to the anger of farmers and others who work in the Dutch agriculture sector and campaigned on the promise of fighting the EU’s mandated nitrogen emissions targets.
This week’s news of Rutte’s departure, coupled with the rise of BBB, is widely expected to exacerbate existing deep-seated divisions over the future of agriculture and farming in the Netherlands.
It also makes it far less likely that the splintered parties will be able to strike a compromise on key politically fraught issues, including nitrate emissions.
What’s next
In the near term, the Dutch government will effectively be held at a standstill, since Rutte will remain in his position through November to oversee a so-called “caretaker” government.
Leading a caretaker government means that Rutte and the holdover group of officials are unable to approve new and important policy decisions until a new government is formed later this year.
Until then, action will be suspended for months on key issues — including the country’s ability to pass important policies on migration or climate, including taking further action on the EU’s nitrate directive.
In May, the European Commission approved the Dutch government’s plan to buy out some of its most heavily polluting farms at roughly 120% of their value. The plan, estimated to cost around $1.65 billion, was aimed at helping the government deliver on its nitrogen emissions reduction commitments without sparking the deep unrest seen last summer.
In announcing the effort, it warned the buyouts could become compulsory if farmers do not comply.
“There is no better offer coming,” Dutch Nitrogen Minister Christianne van der Wal told members of parliament.
Why it matters
The Netherlands is the EU’s largest emitter of nitrogen oxide and ammonia and was ordered by the European Court of Justice in 2018 to address the problem. It also has a nitrogen balance nearly twice the European average — the majority of which comes from farming.
And if it hopes to deliver on its 50% nitrogen reduction target by 2030, the Dutch government must act quickly — it has estimated that to meet its goal, 11,200 farms in the country will have to close. Roughly 17,600 others will have to significantly reduce their livestock numbers.
But that has not gone over smoothly in the Netherlands, a farming and agriculture powerhouse where disagreements over nitrogen pollution reductions have sparked bitter protest and disagreement.
Despite its size of just 16,158 square miles — an area only slightly larger than the state of Maryland — the Netherlands is home to more than 110 million livestock and 54,000 agricultural businesses. It is the most intensively farmed country in all of Europe, and the world’s second-largest exporter of agricultural goods, behind only the United States.
Farm and agriculture groups in the Netherlands have slammed the Dutch government’s plans as “unrealistic,” according to the farming group LTO, and argued that the country’s farmers have been unfairly targeted compared to other industries, which they argue remain comparably unscathed.
Others point to the massive amount of revenue generated by agriculture exports, which totaled roughly 105 billion euros in 2021 alone.
“This is not going to work,” LTO Nederland Chairman Sjaak van der Tak, whose organization represents 35,000 farmers, said in response to the government targets.
Others fear these divisions in the Netherlands could portend a larger trend in Europe and the Western world as environmental targets grow more ambitious.
In Europe, and in other parts of the developed world, party politics on the Left are often dominated by a “knowledge economy,” which includes highly educated people and a sort of “elite” that care deeply about environmental issues, Ted Nordhaus, the executive director of the Breakthrough Institute, a global research center, said in an interview.
“And the Right — in part, because of this reaction to a lot of these environmental policies — ends up actually more closely aligned with the working-class, [sometimes] non-college educated, rural populations,” he said.
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“We see it in Europe. And obviously there’s a bunch of other factors here that are unrelated to environmental politics,” Nordhaus added. “But you do see environmental politics to some degree driving this, and certainly sort of lining up along that fault line.”
