With the EU parliamentary elections less than a month away, Dutch News is talking to several Dutch candidates. Bas Eickhout, number one on the GroenLinks-PvdA list, is second in the series.

The stakes are high for Europe’s green parties on June 6. Five years ago they rode a wave of climate change protests, personified by the Swedish teenage activist Greta Thunberg, to win 74 of the 751 seats, their best ever result. In the following four years the EU’s climate commissioner, Frans Timmermans, steered through the Green Deal, an ambitious plan to make the continent carbon neutral by 2050, and the nature restoration law, which aims to protect land and sea areas that have been damaged by industrial pollution.

In 2024 the winds of protest are blowing from a different direction. Farmers’ groups converged on Brussels in March to vent their anger at the Green Deal and the nature restoration law, claiming they were being undercut by retailers and overstretched by regualtions.

The European Commission responded by watering down the Green Deal so that farmers will no longer have to halve their use of pesticides by 2030. The nature restoration law was put on hold after eight nations, including the Netherlands, withdrew their support in the council of ministers.

“That’s the reason these elections are so important,” says Bas Eickhout, the Dutch leader of the European Green Party since 2018 (he shares the post with Germany’s Terry Reintke). “We can keep banging on about the far right, but in this case it’s the Christian Democrats, the centre right, who’ve been withdrawing their support for the Green Deal, and the nature law has crumbled under an attack from the right.”

Current opinion polls suggest the Greens will be reduced to around 60 seats in June while Identity and Democracy, which includes Geert Wilders’s PVV party, could end up with as many as 100, making them the third largest “family” group in the parliament. The ID faction has attacked Europe’s energy transition, branding it a “total failure” and dismissing the Green Deal targets as “utopian”.

Eickhout argues the European People’s Party, which is dominated by Christian Democrats, has handed the initiative to the far right by backtracking on climate policy to appease rural communities. “We have managed to get laws passed despite resistance from the Christian Democrats, but if the right gets stronger that won’t be possible anymore,” he says. “The future of our nature and our climate policy is really going to be decided in these elections.”

But Eickhout’s fears run deeper. The prospect of Donald Trump returning to the White House has forced Europe to step up its support for Ukraine and face up to the danger of Russian infiltration. But several of the parties who are expected to make gains, such as Germany’s AfD, have close ties to Russia, and the Czech government last month claimed several MEPs were on Moscow’s payroll.

European voters may not always see the importance of the European Parliament, but Vladimir Putin understands it very well, says Eickhout. “The future of our democracy is being determined in Ukraine now. Ultimately Russia wants to influence the whole of Europe. If Ukraine falls, it will weaken us on the eastern border and that will have consequences for the whole European Union.”

Wilders may have moderated his language and ditched his longstanding Nexit policy, but Eickhout says the far-right parties now threaten to undermine the EU by loosening the ties between its member states. “My greatest worry is a weakened Europe,” he says. “That has consequences for our industry, it has consequences for our climate policy, it has consequences for our defence policy and it has consequences for our security.”

Putin and Trump

“Let’s put it simply: a stagnant Europe is an advantage for Putin and Trump,” he says. “They’re scared of a strong Europe, because if we work well together it gives us a strong voice that will make Moscow and Washington – depending in who is in Washington – nervous. If the European parliament is weakened, Europe will be at a standstill, and if you stand still you go backwards.”

The departure of Frans Timmermans, the architect of the Green Deal, to lead the left-wing alliance of Greens and social democrats (GL-PvdA) in last year’s Dutch general election, was an anxious moment for Europe’s green politicians. In his place came Wopke Hoekstra, the former Christian Democrat finance minister, who a year earlier said the Dutch government should consider extending the deadline for reducing nitrogen emissions so that farmers could “earn a fair living”.

Eickhout grilled Hoekstra when parliament’s environmental committee was asked to endorse his candidacy last October, asking if he had pulled on a “green jacket” to secure the job. “In the end we decided to support him, but under the strict condition that he delivered on a number of fronts.”

Despite his initial reservations, Eickhout has been encouraged by Hoekstra’s performance so far: at the COP28 summit in Dubai last December, he called for global emissions to peak by 2025 “at the latest” and helped secure an historic commitment to phase out fossil fuels altogether. “The sooner we do it, the less painful it will be,” Hoekstra said.

Targets

“I still feel he’s wearing a green jacket, but I also get the feeling it fits him well,” Eickhout says. “And when you see how the debate on climate policy in Europe has changed, even in February he stuck with those ambitious targets. But that wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t agreed those terms with him.”

He is more critical of the impasse on agriculture reform, arguing that both the commission and the farmers’ representatives are failing to tackle the root of the problem. “What we see too often is that the economic system forces farmers to upscale,” Eickhout says. “The bigger you are, the more subsidies you get.

“So the farmers are pulled on the one hand in the direction of upscaling, and then we come along with our climate policy and say they need to be more nature inclusive. Climate extremes demand a much more diverse agriculture sector. But those two streams cancel each other out and the farmers are caught in the middle.”

Long-serving

Eickhout, 47, is one of the longest-serving MEPs and one of the few with any kind of name recognition among voters, having first been elected in 2009. He studied chemistry and environmental science at Radboud University in Nijmegen and spent his early career working for research organisations such as the Dutch environmental health agency, the RIVM, and the United Nations’ climate panel, the IPCC.

In 2007 he was one of the authors of the IPCC’s fourth climate assessment, which concluded that most of the increases in temperature since the mid-20^th century were caused by greenhouse gas emissions, and thus man-made; later that year the IPCC shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. Eickhout, though, was frustrated by the lack of progress on climate change and decided to go into politics. “If you want to change things, you need to be at the controls,” he has said.

Curiously, Eickhout is running on the GroenLinks-PvdA joint ticket, but after the election the parties will sit in different parliamentary groups. So PvdA voters will be helping to elect Green MEPs, while GroenLinks votes will count towards the PvdA candidates in the Social Democrat family.

Joint slates

Other Dutch parties are running separate slates of candidates but will sit together, such as D66 and the VVD, both affiliated with the liberal ALDE/Renew faction. It is an example of the complex machinations that can make European politics look opaque, but Eickhout says “voters are capable of understanding how the list system works.”

Besides, he argues, the progressive and left-wing parties will need to work closer together to achieve their aims if the projected shift to the right happens. Right-wing parties have attacked sustainability as a niche activity for suburban homeowners who can afford solar panels, but Eickhout points out the benefits for people at the lower end of the income scale.

“Take housing insulation: it’s good for the climate, but it’s also good for your bank balance because you’re not living in a draughty house. Climate policy is social policy if it’s done equitably.”

Migration

Migration is another issue on which GL-PvdA says Europe should support the vulnerable, in this case cross-border workers and asylum seekers, rather than shut them out at the border. “We want more European co-operation on migration, but when we see inhumane border procedures where we lock up children for long periods, that’s enshrining the concept of Fortress Europe in law,” Eickhout says. “That’s not the Europe we want.

“The same goes for labour migration: we’re very much in favour of labour migration, but eastern European workers are deprived of their rights in the Netherlands. They’re put on a bus in the morning and they have no idea where they’re going to work. That undermines our European values. We want much stronger controls to crack down hard on that kind of abuse of labour migrants’ rights.”

In Eickhout’s view the whole basis of economic policy in Europe needs to be decoupled from the idea of growth and competition between nations, in favour of a circular model where nations pool their resources. “That’s why we want much more European investment,” he says.

Industrial fund

A European industrial fund is much more effective and efficient than having countries bidding against each other with subsidies. Germany and France use their state support to bid for industries in the Netherlands. The competition we have now leads to all kinds of inefficiencies, like the enormous fossil fuel subsidies. They need to be wound down and there are a lot of gains to be made when we do.”

Right-wing parties argue that more decisions should be taken by member states to preserve national sovereignty, but Eickhout says the idea that sovereignty makes the EU’s nations stronger is an illusion. “Why is energy so expensive in Europe? It’s because we have 27 different national energy policies, which means a fragmented energy network and higher energy costs. We all suffer for that. If you want cheaper energy, you need more co-operation.

“It sounds great to say we want to be sovereign, but it’s fake sovereignty. You act as if your country has a bigger say, but really you have less of a say because companies will leave if your energy is too expensive. The same goes for security. If Ukraine falls and Russia becomes stronger, what do you get from national sovereignty? It’s a fake debate.”

Read the first interview in the series with Raquel García Hermida-van der Walle, number two on the D66 list: “Spanish by birth, Dutch by choice and European by conviction”