Frans Timmermans, the former EU heavyweight who has returned to Dutch politics to fight the country’s election in November, has called for the European left to unite against the right’s “astonishing” climate backlash.
The former European Commission vice-president, who is leading the combined GreenLeft and Labour parties, believes progressives need to urgently mobilise against the radical right’s attempt to brand environmental reforms “too costly”.
Speaking to the Guardian in one of his first campaign interviews, Timmermans said the UK government was one of the countries rowing back on green pledges.
Rishi Sunak, the UK prime minister, announced a major U-turn on the government’s climate commitments last month, pushing back the deadline for selling new petrol and diesel cars and the phasing out of gas boilers.
“I think the imminent danger is an attempt by the right to say – and Sunak is a case in point – ‘we cannot afford climate policy because it’s too costly, especially for people who don’t have a lot to spend’,” said Timmermans.
“It’s quite astonishing to see people who generally have not shown a lot of consideration for people with low incomes to all of a sudden become the champions of people with low incomes, fighting climate policy,” he added.
“They are doing it for clear economic interests. The threat to progressives, to the left, is that this contradiction between social justice and climate justice is exploited by the right and is divisive for the left.”
Timmermans wants to reduce Dutch greenhouse gas emissions by 65% by 2030 – above the 55% EU target – and believes a brake on climate action confuses businesses and consumers.
Sweden, as well as the UK, recently announced pushbacks on green targets and budgets, while there are negative noises from Germany on building insulation costs. But Timmermans was particularly scathing about Sunak’s policies, warning that the “radicals seem[ed] to be taking over” the British Conservative party.
He suggested it was a false economy for Sunak to push back a ban on new petrol and diesel vehicles. “I hope we can convincingly show our citizens the longer you delay measures pertaining to the climate crisis, the more expensive they become, and the harder it becomes to change,” he said.
When Timmermans – a popular Dutch Labour politician and former foreign minister with a formidable command of languages and new, white beard – was announced as head of the new coalition, it topped polls. It is now polling narrowly behind Mark Rutte’s centre-right party, the VVD, and New Social Contract, founded by the backbench “centrist-outsider” Pieter Omtzigt.
But trust in politics is at desperate lows. In 2021 a previous Rutte government was felled – partly thanks to Omtzigt’s backbench scrutiny – after thousands of parents, often dual nationals, were falsely accused of childcare benefits fraud. The country is paying a €22bn debt of honour to the region of Groningen, where decades of extracting gas worth billions damaged about 85,000 buildings.
Timmermans, who has just spent five weeks touring the country, pledges to simplify bureaucracy and rely more on trusting people. “As somebody from a coal mining region, I still find [Groningen] astonishing because in the coal mining region, we had the same issues with houses being affected but there was an immediate response,” he said.
He said a recent scandal in which the tax authority was found to be marking people as more likely to be committing fraud based on their ethnic origin – a practice the finance minister admitted was “institutionally racist” – was another reason for the trust gap in Dutch politics.
Timmermans said he found the revelations “terribly, terribly painful” and acknowledged that restoring trust among voters would “take quite some time”.
Despite the fact that the current four-party government, led by Rutte, fell in July over “unbridgeable” differences on asylum, Timmermans denied that immigration would be a divisive subject in the run-up to the 22 November poll.
“Uncontrolled migration is one of the factors of insecurity in our society, so addressing it is a responsibility of the left as much as it is of the right,” he said. “We need a responsible migration policy, starting with the international agreements we have.”
Taking aim at the UK again, where the home secretary, Suella Braverman, last week gave a populist speech warning of a “hurricane” of mass migration, he added: “We are not [Suella] Braverman. These are the bedrock of our values. This is what western democracy is all about.”
Timmermans’s manifesto proposes increasing the minimum wage, better support for those on lower incomes with pollution taxes, higher profit taxes for business, a new top rate income tax, “millionaire” wealth levy and crackdown on tax evasion, but also changes that will hit average households such as phasing out mortgage interest relief. He is aware, he says, that he can be divisive: “For some people climate policies are red flags: they get really excited in the negative sense thinking about climate policy, and the rightwing media have portrayed me as the ‘climate pope’ for a long time.”
But he is selling a “better society”, he said. “There is a strong perceived sentiment of injustice in our society, and we have to address the issue of redistribution,” he said. “That will bring back a bit more self-confidence. We went from ‘there’s nothing we can’t solve because we’re the Dutch’, to ‘there’s nothing we can solve because we’re the Dutch’.”
This Monty Python fan, dressed in smart jacket and shirt above the table and jeans and trainers below, wrote a heartbroken love letter to Britain about Brexit and believes there are still strong parallels between the UK and the Netherlands.
“To put it in my kids’ language, we’ve lost our swag,” he said. “Remember Cool Britannia? Nobody talks about Cool Britannia today. If you are proud of your country, you’re also more resilient. If you lose confidence in your ability to be resilient, then everything becomes a problem.”
The power of the united left, building a greener future across a splintering political landscape, is his answer. “One of the reasons I returned to Dutch politics,” he said, “is because we now have an opportunity to have a movement in the other direction.”
