When the first estimates fell after the Dutch provincial election, Wednesday, March 15, she let out a cry: ” It is not possible ! What is happening here ? » Caroline van der Plas, hair in disarray, had just led her Citizen Farmer Movement (BBB) to a resounding victory: the first party in the Netherlands, 15 senator seats (maybe 16 or 17, when the count is fully completed) , close to 20% of the vote. More than the environmentalist and socialist left united, more than the liberal party of Prime Minister Mark Rutte, forced to let go a little pitifully: “We would have liked to do better”…
In a few months, the founder of a party which had only won one deputy seat (hers, and 1% of the vote) during the 2021 legislative elections swept away everything in its path: the far-right parties of Thierry Baudet (winner of the same election in 2019) and Geert Wilders, but, above all, the four majority parties, all losing ground. This is the case of the Christian Democratic Appeal, for which his mother campaigned and that “Karolaajn”, as he is called in his province of Overijssel (north-east), left in 2019, accusing him of abandoning the defense of the peasantry.
Now 55, this woman did not come from a farming family. His mother, of Irish origin, was a municipal councilor in Deventer, his father was a sports reporter. It was by working as a journalist, then as a communication consultant for the agri-food and livestock sector, that Caroline van der Plas found her calling. In 2015, she registered the domain name of a possible peasant party, but it was her meeting, in 2018, with the heads of a marketing office that decided her to go into politics.
Climate change “has always existed”
In the fall of 2019, a protest movement will quickly swell: the agricultural lobby will mobilize against the government’s “Nitrogen Plan”. Tens of thousands of peasants will protest, sometimes violently, against a project which aims to drastically reduce the emissions of the country, champion of intensive farming and the first European exporter of meat from the European Union. Here and there, the radical environmentalist movement Extinction Rebellion attacks farms. “These people don’t know what families are going through”gets angry at the time the founder of the BBB, who refuses to describe the agricultural world as that “polluters, criminals, poisoners and animal killers”.
You have 50.23% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.