Can Germany's future be found in Holland?

Dear Reader,

If you want to peer into Germany’s political future you could do worse than look at what is going on in the Netherlands at the moment.

This week, a coalition led by Geert Wilders’ radical Party for Freedom (PVV) announced that it had reached an agreement to form a government after six, long months of negotiation.

Both the structure of the new Dutch government and the contents of its coalition pact are harbingers of what lies ahead for Germany.

Firstly, the government is made up of outsiders.

Wilders, a political outcast and staunch critic of Islam, has put together a four-way coalition that only includes one party with any experience of governance.

Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV), has been joined by the BBB, a farmers’ party set up in 2019 to protest planned cuts to livestock numbers, and a conservative splinter group called the NSC that was established shortly before the election.

Only the VDD, Holland’s traditional party of power, has any experience in government. They have had to accept a junior role in Wilder’s populist project after the Dutch public swung wildly to the right last autumn.

Secondly, the Dutch coalition pact has two central pledges that could apply to Germany soon: to bring in “the toughest asylum policies of all time”, and to roll back a raft of environmental policies.

Wilders wants to turn asylum seekers back at the German border and has announced plans to pull his country out of the EU’s migration rules.

Meanwhile, he has pledged to cut energy costs by drilling for gas in the North Sea, cutting funding for onshore wind turbines, and building new nuclear reactors. The coalition pact will also put the motorway speed limit back up to 130 km/h, scrap a national carbon tax, and end cuts to livestock numbers.

The parallels with Germany are hard to ignore. 

Similar to the Netherlands, German public opinion has shifted away from a Green Zeitgeist due to the fact that a one-off opening of the borders for refugees in 2015 has turned into a permanent state of affairs, and environmental rules have driven up living costs.

Where locals once welcomed migrants, they now take to the streets to demand that no refugee shelters are built near their homes. A few years ago these marches were organised by neo-Nazis - now the middle classes are protesting about noisy neighbours and a lack of green space.

A decision announced last year by the Green-controlled Energy Ministry to ban gas heating led to mass protests from which the current government has never recovered. With Germans in a deeply gloomy mood over the future of the economy, analysis has shown that the only voters who haven’t deserted the Greens are state employees who don’t need to fear job cuts.

Source: www.forschungsgruppe.de

Another parallel to the Netherlands: many of these unpopular policies weren’t enacted by the Greens. It was the centre-right Christian Democrats who shut down nuclear power, who introduced a national carbon tax (and never made good on the promise to give the money back to the needy), and who upset farmers by restricting fertilizer use.

The result? New right-wing parties claiming to be the true heirs to German conservatism are sprouting out of the ground wie Pilze im Herbst. Polling shows that around 60 percent of Germans would currently vote for parties of the right… but that vote is split between five separate competitors:

SOURCE: www.forschungsgruppe.de

Largest and most well known among the newcomers is the AfD, which like Wilders has stoked fears about the “Islamisation of Europe.” But there is also a splinter group from the CDU called the Werteunion; a conservative-socialist mashup called the BSW led by charismatic firebrand Sahra Wagenknecht; and a rural party called the Freie Wähler, led by Bavarian farmer Hubert Aiwanger.

These newcomers are trying to outdo one another with their attacks on “Green gaga.”

The combustible Aiwanger recently declared that it was his duty to “hold back the Greens and other extremists.” Wagenknecht has described the Greens as “the most hypocritical, arrogant, deceitful and incompetent party in the Bundestag.”

The CDU have also sensed which way the wind is blowing. Party leader Friedrich Merz once flirted with the Greens, but now calls them his “biggest opponent.” Meanwhile, the pro-business Free Democrats are currently locked into a coalition with the Greens, but have taken up the role of “opposition from within” to try and stop a disastrous slide in their polling figures.

As things are going, it is a question of if rather than when Germany experiences its own Dutch revolt.

My bet would be on the election after next.

At the upcoming election in 2025 the CDU will likely get the largest vote share - but they will still look to the left rather than to the right to build the next government. Differences of opinion with the populists on issues like arms shipments to Ukraine will still be more pressing than the death-by-a-thousand-pin-pricks gaffe of building an industrial strategy around renewables.

Merz still hasn’t categorically ruled out a coalition with the Greens. If he goes for that option he should expect to suffer the same fate as Olaf Scholz: slipping into the twilight zone in polling.

A coalition with the SPD would be less damaging. But it is still highly unlikely that it would find the political will to reverse course on a fundamental policy decision that has taken the wind out of the sails of the country’s economy. With the major costs of moving to renewable energy still ahead, the discontent that has been pushing voters to the right is only going to intensify.

That leaves the autumn of 2029 as the date when the populists and upstarts will have their chance. We will have to keep a close eye on the Netherlands to see just what they do with it.

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