Road-blocks as party-political publicity

Is the antithesis of globalism’s totalistic vision of Man really only reaction to specific aspects of the globalist programme?  Can the latter ever be enough?

This is the question which lies ahead if and when that reaction gains momentum across the West (or, most likely, in those parts of it which employ some form of electoral proportional representation).  It is the question on which the future of nationalism and of the West would then depend.  But for now, in the wake of the Farmer-Citizen movement [BoerBurgerBeweging or BBB] showing in last Wednesday’s election to the Dutch Senate, the answer is the usual: anything’s better than nothing.  Just be grateful for what few scraps fall from history’s table, it says.

Put most directly, the BBB’s scraps testify to a deep-rooted and emerging conflict between the shameless careerists of the Dutch political machine and the traditionalist spirit of rural Holland.  Electorally, that conflict is pitting the urban liberal elites and the strangulated postmoderns who are the victims of green propaganda against hitherto betrayed and voiceless conservatives.  It sounds revolutionary, but civic nationalist populism is never that.

As of this moment, the external mainstream media have yet to explain that the people over whom the elite’s environmentalism and progressivism ride still retain the power to vote. The BBC reported the election with scarcely a word about the underlying cause:

A farmers’ party has stunned Dutch politics, and is set to be the biggest party in the upper house of parliament after provincial elections.

The Farmer-Citizen movement was only set up in 2019 in the wake of widespread farmers’ protests.

But with most votes counted they are due to win 15 of the Senate’s seats with almost 20% of the vote.

“This isn’t normal, but actually it is! It’s all normal citizens who voted,” said leader Caroline van der Plas.

The BBB aims to fight government plans to slash nitrogen emissions harmful to biodiversity by dramatically reducing livestock numbers and buying out thousands of farms.

But its appeal has spread rapidly beyond its rural heartland, on a populist platform that represents traditional, conservative Dutch social and moral values.

Shocked by the scale of their success, Ms van der Plas told supporters that voters normally stayed at home if they lost faith in politics: “But today people have shown they can’t stay at home any longer. We won’t be ignored any more.”

A left-wing Green-Labour alliance is also on course to win 15 Senate seats, while Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s four-party coalition is poised to fall back to 24 - down eight seats.

Turnout in Wednesday’s vote, estimated at 57.5%, was the highest for years.

For nationalists the election was double-edged.  Nowhere in the West can nationalism both speak its own truths and trim to accommodate mainstream sensibilities.  Where it gains something by the latter it seems destined to lose it when a civic nationalist party comes along.

Accordingly, the growth in BBB’s vote-share has came at a cost to Thierry Baudet’s divided and weakened Forum for Democracy (FvD), which won nearly 15% of the vote in 2019 provincial elections, but collapsed to 3% this time.  The concern, therefore, is that BBB is not expanding into the conservative vote-share as much as it might seem, but hoovering up the votes of the existing dissenters on the basis of another “new way forward”.  Certainly, BBB did not just focus on Mark Rutte’s environmental extremism in the wake of the farmers protests.  It presented itself as a dog-whistle right-wing populist party which was somewhat critical of the EU, likewise critical of immigration, and in favour of banning burkas for Muslims.

In any case, the Re-Set is real and oncoming.  In Holland and, via Reform, in the UK civic nationalism seems set to carry the dissenter’s torch.  One way or another the question of its sufficiency will be answered.