The question will always be how deep love really runs. ‘What in God’s name should I say about those cunt farmers?, Thierry Baudet wonders in an unguarded moment in an audio fragment that leaked this week through his former FvD companion Henk Otten. He hoped that this would be a service to all farmers ‘who still think that Thierry Baudet and Gideon van Meijeren are really involved’.
Otten did not achieve the effect he intended for everyone. The senator was overwhelmed with aggressive reactions (‘minus incompetent man’) and above all with disbelief: fake recording, vague fragment. Baudet’s fellow group member Gideon van Meijeren did not feel inhibited in any way this week from setting himself up as the mouthpiece of the great discontent in the countryside.
Moreover, a mouthpiece who does not throw water on the fire, but boiling oil: ‘The system cannot be changed through a normal political route. That would work if we lived in a functioning democracy, but unfortunately that is no longer the case. The whole system has to collapse so that we can take back power.’
Is that what the National Coordinator for Counterterrorism and Security means by warning that the farmers’ protest is not only becoming more aggressive, but also broader: ‘Connecting different groups with different grievances, linked by anti-government thinking, can encourage hardening.’ The coordinator already predicted in April that the end of the corona lockdown would herald the search for a new battlefield: “Agitators and conspiracy theorists will probably focus on other social themes in which they oppose the government.”
Fear of accidents
The curfew as an object of hate has now been seamlessly replaced by Minister Van der Wal’s nitrogen map. Action group Netherlands in Resistance, known for the major corona protests, joined the activists on Friday with a ‘Walk of Freedom’ in Harderwijk. The peasants, for example, are suddenly the shock troops of the revolt against the administrative Netherlands, fired on without hesitation from parliament.
This week it became clear once more where that could lead. Virtually no driver who is involved in the nitrogen dossier can still drive on the street without a care in the world; homes of politicians are guarded; around the House of Representatives and the ministries of The Hague, the police are permanently on a high state of alert. The fear of real accidents is growing by the day, while more and more radical texts are appearing in Telegram groups of the activists: ‘Let The Hague burn.’
Violently shocked by all the aggression, the House met on Thursday evening to blow off steam and instruct the cabinet to resume ‘talking’ with the farmers as soon as possible and to offer them ‘perspective’. For most of the activists this may be a welcome guideline, but where should the conversation start with the people who are now deeply convinced that the government has declared war on them? Member of parliament Wybren van Haga made no attempt to make a start: ‘We see it in all totalitarian regimes: it starts with an attack on the farmers.’
impotence
Discomfort about this rhetoric is also growing among the farmers themselves. Pauline van Rijsoort, cattle farmer in Friesland and in 2008 a Dutch celebrity thanks to Farmer seeks wife, was awake this week, threw her heartfelt cry on Twitter and garnered much acclaim: ‘That we farmers have allowed ourselves to be incited in such a way by people and politicians who tell us out of pure voting that our right to exist is disappearing. Translate the policy as: all farmers must leave. That after the farmers it is the turn of the citizens.’
The manure problem has been ignored by politicians for years, emphasizes Van Rijsoort. ‘We now all have our backs against the wall: farmers and policymakers. And inciting populists like to take advantage of that. They like to see the country disrupted. We can do that with our tractors.’
There is hope in the House of Representatives and the Cabinet that this sound will eventually win; that the camp of the ‘reasonable’ offers a way out of the impasse. The idea of former agriculture minister Cees Veerman to appoint a mediator between the cabinet and farmers was eagerly embraced by Prime Minister Rutte on Thursday evening. If such a ‘conciliator’ were to succeed in convincing the farmers that there really is a future for slightly less intensive agriculture, then the masses might disappear under the protests. At least that’s the hope. Because then the fun will probably disappear quickly for Gideon van Meijeren.
Although that is not the case for the time being. On Saturday he addresses the activists at an ‘agricultural conference’ organized by himself in Tuil, Gelderland. There he will make no attempt to calm them down, only to openly adopt them one more time: ‘The war against the peasants is also our war.’