European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen delivers a news conference in Brussels, July 19 (European Commission/Christophe Licoppe)
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has proposed an unprecedented intervention in European energy markets to bring down electricity and gas prices:
Cap the price Europe pays for Russian gas.
Cap prices of electricity generated in non-gas plants.
Mandate energy conservation during peak hours.
Tax windfall profits made by energy companies to finance relief for small businesses and households.
Russia immediately threatened to cut off all energy supplies if member states agreed to the plan.
The Netherlands, which led the opposition to a blanket cap on gas prices, could support one for Russian gas.
The Czech Republic, which holds the rotating presidency of the EU, remains skeptical. Industry minister Jozef Síkela told reporters a council of European energy ministers on Friday would consider only two proposals: delinking electricity and gas prices, and capping electricity generated in non-gas plants. (The second requires the first.) (more…)
Coal plant and wind turbines in the Eemshaven of the Netherlands (Kees van de Veen)
European countries spent €280 billion on subsidies and tax cuts in the last year to help businesses and households pay their energy bills.
It may not be enough.
Prices surged when Russia expanded its war in Ukraine in February and European states agreed to reduce their imports of Russian natural gas. The EU as a whole got 40 percent of its gas from Russia in previous years. That is down to 20 percent.
But there are more factors pushing up electricity and gas prices. Here is an overview, including what governments have done to ameliorate the effects. (more…)
Prime Minister Mark Rutte answers questions from Dutch lawmakers in The Hague, September 17, 2020 (Tweede Kamer)
Farm protests in the Netherlands have divided Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s four-party coalition.
Foreign minister and deputy prime minister Wopke Hoekstra, who leads the junior Christian Democratic party, told the AD newspaper last week that the government’s ambition to halve nitrogen emissions by 2030 was no longer “sacrosanct”.
Christianne van der Wal, the minister who designed the targets, and a member of Rutte’s liberal party (of which I am a member too), publicly described Hoekstra’s seeming capitulation to demonstrating farmers as “unpleasant”. Het Parool, the newspaper of Amsterdam, reports she privately called it a “stab in the back.”
Sigrid Kaag, the finance minister and leader of the left-liberal D66, accused Hoekstra of undermining “trust” between the ruling parties.
Rutte downplayed the split on Tuesday, arguing Hoekstra had a right to speak his mind as party leader, even if, as a member of the cabinet, he is expected to represent the government’s policy. (more…)
Brothers of Italy party leader Giorgia Meloni speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida, February 26, 2022 (Vox España)
Italy’s next coalition government will likely consist of three right-wing parties: the Brothers of Italy, League and Forza Italia (Forward Italy) are polling at close to 50 percent support, which should be enough to give them control of both chambers of parliament.
For the first time, the Brothers of Italy, who split from Forza in 2012, would place first and provide the prime minister: Giorgia Meloni.
The (formerly Northern) League, led by Matteo Salvini, won the election in 2018, but conservatives were disappointed when it formed a government with the left-populist Five Star Movement, and even more disappointed when Salvini left the government in a failed bid to force snap elections.
Forza has been in third place since their leader, Silvio Berlusconi, lost reelection in 2013.
The parties have released a joint manifesto for the election in September that is light on detail but nevertheless provides the best clues about what a right-wing government might do. Here are the main points. (more…)
I debunked four misconceptions about the Dutch farm crisis here a month ago: that reducing Dutch farming will lead to food shortages; that the Dutch government prioritizes an elite green agenda over the livelihoods of its people; that farmers are being chased off their land to build homes; and that the media weren’t covering the story.
That’s certainly changed, but with all the media attention there have also been more mistakes and a few outright fabrications.
Before I debunk those, let me recommend better sources. AFP and Time have excellent stories. I wrote an explainer about the farm crisis in June and have an article in World Politics Review about what it portends for food producers elsewhere.
European Central Bank president Mario Draghi speaks with European lawmakers in Brussels, September 23, 2019 (European Parliament/Dominique Hommel)
Mario Draghi is on his way out.
The former European Central Bank chief, prime minister of Italy for eighteen months, failed on Thursday to keep his coalition together. The populist-left Five Star Movement and right-wing League and Forza Italia boycotted a confidence vote in parliament.
Draghi’s resignation could trigger an early election in the autumn, which would push passage of the 2023 budget, including measures to help businesses and families cope with inflation, to next year.
It also puts a six-year, €221-billion investment and reform program at risk that’s funded by the EU. (I analyzed the plan here.) Right-wing opponents are polling in first place. (more…)
Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez and NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg attend the NATO summit in Madrid, June 28 (NATO)
Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez has found a new excuse for not talking with Catalan leaders: they don’t want to talk with him.
Catalan lawmaker Gabriel Rufián, whose Republican Left usually votes with Sánchez’ minority left-wing government, asked the prime minister in Congress when the negotiations he promised at the start of his term would resume. Sánchez argued they could only continue if Together for Catalonia, the region’s second-largest independence party, rejoined the negotiating table.
But the reason Together walked out is that Sánchez has delayed negotiations for two-and-a-half years. (more…)
Cows are fed by a robot on a Dutch dairy farm (Lely)
When I wrote my explainer about the Dutch farm crisis a month ago, there had been little interest in the story abroad. Now when you type “Dutch farmers” in Google News, you’ll get hundreds of results.
I noticed a change when I suddenly got 10,000 readers in a day. (I usually have a few hundred.) Two things happened.
First a policeman shot at a tractor leaving a farmers’ protests. The driver turned out to be a sixteen year-old boy. Nobody was injured. National police are investigating exactly what happened, but it appears the officer thought the tractor was deliberately trying to crash into a colleague. (He didn’t realize the driver was a teenager.) In a country where cops seldom draw their weapons, much less shoot at people, the story was frontpage news, which led to Netherlands-based foreign correspondents filing their own stories.
Then Eva Vlaardingerbroek, a failed parliamentary candidate for the Netherlands’ far-right Forum for Democracy, was interviewed about the protests on Fox News. (Vlaardingerbroek was credited as a “legal philosopher” rather than a former politician for the only political party in the Netherlands that still defends Vladimir Putin.) She told one lie after another. Media Matters has the details.
Other right-wing commentators and media, some writing about the Netherlands for the first time, repeated Vlaardingerbroek’s fabrications. I’ll debunk the four most common misconceptions. (more…)
Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte arrives at NATO headquarters in Brussels, June 14, 2021 (NATO)
Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte finds himself between a rock and a hard place.
His government’s plan to reduce pollution from farms, which requires reductions in livestock, has caused farmers and their sympathizers to leave his liberal VVD and Christian democratic coalition partner, CDA. Both parties are down in the polls.
But to the extent that Rutte is willing to give in to farmers’ demands, it disappoints left-wing voters, which hurts his other governing partner, D66.
It’s one of the issues I discussed last week with Alex Keeney and Atlantic Sentinel contributor Pratik Chougule on their podcast for political prediction markets, Star Spangled Gamblers. Can the center in the Netherlands hold? (more…)
There’s good news and bad news from the drugs front in Amsterdam.
The good news is that a new coalition government of Labor, liberal Democrats and Greens want to pilot the legal sale of MDMA, also known as ecstasy. The three parties won the municipal elections in March.
The national government, in which the liberal Democrats rule with three center-right parties (including my own), has agreed to study the decriminalization of MDMA, although for medicinal use. A majority in the Amsterdam city council want to regulate recreational use as well.
The bad news is that Mayor Femke Halsema is still trying to convince the council to ban the sale of cannabis to tourists. I wrote an op-ed against her proposal in the NRC newspaper in April and have another story about it in Het Parool, the newspaper of Amsterdam.
The arguments used by both sides in Amsterdam will sound familiar to Americans. Proponents of decriminalization want to reduce harm. Opponents fear it would lead to more drug use. (more…)
Skyline of Paris, France at night, February 9, 2019 (Unsplash/Sabina Fratila)
My hunch was correct after all. Before the French elections, I argued the most likely outcome was Emmanuel Macron winning a second term as president but losing his majority in the National Assembly and being forced into a coalition with the center-right.
After the presidential election, Macron’s liberals moved up in the polls. They also did reasonably well in the opening round of the legislative elections a week ago. It gave this Macronist hope that the president might defend his majority after all.
But no. His alliance, Together, is projected to fall to 234 seats, down from the 350 it won in 2017 and 55 short of a majority.
Night falls on the Bourbon Palace, seat of the French National Assembly, in Paris, June 8, 2007 (J.R. Rosenberg)
The outcome of the first voting round of the legislative elections in France confirms the three-way split I wrote about in April. President Emmanuel Macron’s liberal centrists and the left-wing New Ecologic and Social People’s Union (NUPES, it sounds better in French) took 26 percent support each. The combined far right won 23 percent.
The once-dominant Republicans, who were last in power under Nicolas Sarkozy, divided up the rest with also-rans and regional parties.
The electoral map reveals a geographical divide. Macron’s candidates placed first in the biggest cities and the prosperous western half of the country. The left have their stronghold in the interior of the south. That was once the heartland of the French Communist Party. They also took the low-income suburbs of Paris. The far right got its best results in the deindustrialized north and on the Mediterranean coast, where nationalists have roots going back decades, to when white Algerians settled there after independence. (more…)
One in three Dutch farms may need to close. It’s the most painful consequence of the government’s plan to cut nitrogen emissions in half by 2030.
The farmers’ lobby is furious, calling the plan “unrealistic” and an attack on the countryside. Pro-farmer parties have gained in the polls at the expense of the ruling Christian Democrats and liberals.
Provincial deputies, who would need to decide on a case-by-case basis which farms can stay and which need to go, fear a backlash in regional elections in March. That would also put Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s majority at risk. Provincial deputies elect the Senate in May.
Rutte’s center-right VVD (of which I am a member), is split down the middle. 51 percent of members who attended the annual party congress on Saturday voted for a motion to soften the farm policy.
The cabinet minister responsible for it, Christianne van der Wal — who is of our party, but who answers to parliament, not the party — told a reporter on Sunday she has little wiggle room. “I’m always open to good ideas,” she said. “But the targets are crystal clear.”
Before the coronavirus pandemic, Rutte — who has been in power for twelve years — called the nitrogen crisis the biggest of his political career. Yet there has been little coverage of it internationally. I suspect the reason is that Dutch media tend to emphasize reduction targets that are the result of judicial rulings, which gives foreign correspondents the impression that this is a Netherlands-only problem. But when you take a step back from nitrogen pollution and look at the impact of agriculture altogether, the Dutch is not an isolated case at all. It looks more like a preview of the future of intensive animal farming globally, if intensive animal farming has a future at all.
I’ll do my best to explain both the narrow issue of nitrogen pollution and the broader story of animal farming. Along the way, I’ll review the arguments farmers have made against reductions and I’ll end with the political implications for Rutte’s coalition. (more…)
British prime minister Boris Johnson leads his Latvian counterpart, Arturs Krišjānis Kariņš, up the stairs of 10 Downing Street in London, England, March 14 (Valsts kanceleja)
At least 54 British Conservatives want Boris Johnson to go. That was the minimum — 15 percent of lawmakers — needed to trigger a vote of confidence. The prime minister needs to convince a majority of 180 of his colleagues to keep him in office. The vote will be held tonight.
The immediate cause of the rebellion is an investigation that found Johnson broke COVID-19 lockdown rules by attending and hosting multiple parties and other social events in 10 Downing Street, his London residence, through 2020 and 2021.
Other reasons given by Johnson’s internal critics to push him out are: raising taxes on energy companies, when Conservatives are supposed to be the party of low taxes; sending asylum seekers to Rwanda while their applications are being processed in the UK; and threatening to pull out of an agreement with the EU that has kept the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland open.
Not only did the prime minister break the rules; he repeatedly breaks his word. (more…)
Dutch soldiers fire a mortar round during an exercise near Oldebroek, May 8, 2014 (Ministerie van Defensie)
The Dutch government is raising defense spending to nearly €20 billion in order to meet NATO’s 2-percent target.
The ruling four-party coalition (which includes my own liberal party) increased military spending from €12 to €14 billion prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It is adding another €15 billion over the next three years, which should be enough to reach 2 percent of GDP by the time of the next election in 2025.
Per capita, this would make the Netherlands the largest military spender in the EU. In Europe, only the British spend more.
It is a turnaround for a country that only ten years ago sold almost all its artillery, frigates and tanks. (more…)
