With an open attack on conservative and populist parties on the right, D66 leader Sigrid Kaag has opened a second front in the campaign for the provincial elections on 15 March. If “the alliance of PVV, BBB, FVD and JA21” attracts many votes, then, according to Kaag, “the problems will get bigger and solutions will get further out of sight”. “If the keys to the provincial houses fall into the wrong hands, there is a threat of stagnation,” she said at the official start of the D66 campaign in a theater in Arnhem. “Then nature will deteriorate and the Netherlands will remain the mega stable of Europe” and “we will not be able to build a house for everyone who needs it”.
If the keys to the provincial houses fall into the wrong hands, there is a threat of a standstill
When VVD leader Mark Rutte opposed the left-wing combination of GroenLinks and PvdA a month ago with a warning against tax increases, the prime minister was aiming for a conflict in which his liberal coalition partner in the cabinet is not a player. Unlike CDA leaders, D66 politicians decided not to be openly frustrated about this at the time. By now drawing attention to a political theme that the provinces are about – nitrogen and housing construction – Kaag is trying to become relevant again in the run-up to the parliamentary elections next month. Two months later, the new members of Parliament also elect the new Senate.
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Opposing the radical right
It is the tried and tested strategy with which Kaag’s predecessor Alexander Pechtold made his party great and brought it back into the cabinet from 2017. He invariably opposed Geert Wilders’ PVV.
Kaag now chooses a broader opponent, where she speaks of “the threat of a large conservative bloc in the senate” and “parties that do not want to tackle climate change” and “undermine the necessary nitrogen measures”. “We can’t cooperate with that.”
In an interview in it AD, Saturday morning, Kaag went one step further by stating that a cabinet crisis is imminent if parties that want to put the brakes on the cabinet’s nitrogen approach, get the say in provinces. “Then we all have a big problem in this country,” she warned. “It also undermines how we want to implement policy. Then you also have a credibility problem.”
Migration is ‘not the theme’
Nitrogen is a subject that government partners VVD and CDA prefer to avoid in this campaign – they have to fear more electoral competition from parties such as JA21 and BBB. In turn, Sigrid Kaag prefers not to talk about asylum policy and migration. “That is not the theme for the Provincial Council,” she told AD. Nevertheless, she rejected the proposal that is now being discussed by several parties on the right: building border fences at Europe’s external borders to limit the influx of refugees. “Remembering international agreements and what it means to be a civilized country: for me, fences are not one of them.”
Kaag emphasized in the interview that stopping migration “is an impossible wish”. The fact that a majority of the House of Representatives, with the support of coalition parties VVD and CDA, adopted a motion this week to investigate the reception of refugees outside Europe, Kaag finds a worrying development. “As a D66 member, that worries me.”
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