This was announced by Prime Minister Mark Rutte and his three Deputy Prime Ministers Kaag (D66), Hoekstra (CDA) and Schouten (CU) on Friday during an inserted press conference.
It has been agreed that the current nitrogen policy will be continued for the time being, but that this will probably be renegotiated by the summer. The escape clause is intended to keep the CDA in the coalition. That party has indicated that it wants to break open the coalition agreement on nitrogen in a few months, but not yet.
In any case, the wasting of time will last as long as the big election winner BBB is negotiating in the provinces about new provincial governments to be formed. The expectation is that these new boards will openly oppose essential elements of the government’s nitrogen policy, such as the forced buy-out of farmers and the year 2030 as the target date for achieving the nitrogen targets, even more than now.
It was remarkable that both Rutte and the deputy prime ministers tried to argue on Friday that nitrogen policy will not be postponed, but will be ‘accelerated’. Yet none of them could give concrete examples of measures that will be accelerated from now on. According to Rutte, the answer lay ‘partly in the provinces’.
New political reality
The CDA in particular wants to await the nitrogen negotiations in the provinces before a decision is taken to break open the coalition agreement. The Christian Democrats assume that ‘a new political reality’ will have emerged in a few months’ time, as a result of which the party itself will no longer have to negotiate vigorously in The Hague and therefore not have to pay too much political capital for it.
D66 accepts the sword of Damocles that from now on hangs over the nitrogen policy to prevent the fall of the cabinet, Kaag implicitly acknowledged on Friday. “A lot is happening that is going well in this cabinet,” Kaag said on Friday when asked why D66 agreed to the deal.
One of the more recent crown jewels of D66 − namely a new law in which the target date for achieving the nitrogen targets is brought forward from 2035 to 2030 − is also questionable. According to Kaag, it is ‘not the intention to speed up the law’ so that it will quickly go to the House of Representatives and the Senate for assessment, even before the CDA gets the chance to break open the coalition agreement.
Like the other coalition parties, D66 does not benefit from elections. Both VVD, D66, CDA and CU would lose if there were another ballot now. The party leaders all vehemently denied that the compromise presented on Friday is a stay of execution.
