The 'Jessiah': the Dutch progressive trying to turn back the populist tide

The Netherlands’ Green leader, Jesse Klaver, has quadrupled his party’s polling in a few months and is now closing in on Geert Wilders’ far-right Freedom party

It isn’t hard to see why, with only a hint of tongue-in-cheek, Jesse Klaver is described by some in the Netherlands as “the Jessiah”. Amid so much doom and gloom about the fate of the left across Europe in the face of seemingly unstoppable populist movements, the success of the bright-eyed 30-year-old leader of the Green Left party in the polls just two weeks from the country’s election day is proving to be something of a buoy that many progressives are holding on to for dear life.

Klaver’s father has a Moroccan background, his mother is from mixed Dutch and Indonesian stock. He is unashamedly “pro-EU and pro-refugee”. And in a few short months, while the far-right Freedom party’s Geert Wilders has been complaining about “Moroccan scum”, Klaver has quadrupled his party’s standing in the polls. And he’s done it with his shirt sleeves rolled up and a smile on his face.

Because of the quirks of the Netherlands’ extreme proportional representation electoral system, the disintegration of the vote of its Labour party, the fragmenting of tribal loyalties and the insistence from the entire political class that they will not help Wilders form a coalition government, there is even an outside chance, whisper it, that the boy-wonder could be the next Dutch prime minister.

The governing liberal party led by Mark Rutte is standing at about 16% in the current poll of polls, as is Wilders’ party. Three others parties, including the Greens, hover around 11%. A leftwing coalition – led by GroenLinks (Green Left) – could possibly be formed and include the Eurosceptic and hard-left Socialist party (SP) or even the fringe PvdD, an animal rights party, the respected Centre for European Reform has reported.

At a so-called Meetup event last week, not dissimilar to a political rally but with added cool in the form of a Syrian refugee-turned-rapper to warm up the crowd, Klaver was in no mood to downplay expectations. The previous evening he had been roundly picked on by the other leaders during a TV debate watched by 1.3 million people. But while some have said the political ingénue stumbled in the early stages of the debate, the focus on Klaver from the older group of white men had only gone to further frame him as a serious candidate.

Klaver told his young audience at the Meetup, staged in a music venue in the university town of Leiden, that he had taken strength from the attacks. As prime minister, he would offer “hope and change”. Out would go the old “holy trinity” of economic growth, the market and the rollback of the state, and in would come empathy, economic equality and protection of the climate. Enough of the scapegoating of the incomers to the Netherlands, he said, this is a “movement of empathy”.

The Green Left party in the Netherlands was formed 25 years ago by the merger of four political groups: the communists, pacifists, evangelicals and the self-styled political radicals. Unlike many green parties elsewhere in Europe that emerged from environmental activist groups, Groen Links has always had a social dimension to its politics and traditionally done well in a general election after the Dutch Labour party has been tainted by being in power. But the Greens have never before managed to connect with the highly educated segment of the electorate as Klaver appears to have done, let alone had the chance to be part of a Dutch government.

“As it looks now, we might need four or five parties to form a majority government. In which case the Green party would be one of the candidates”, said Professor Sarah de Lange, of Amsterdam university.

Talking after his speech, in a small anteroom at the venue with his wife, Jolein, in an armchair by his side, the man himself is charm personified, even when challenged that as a party of protest, governing might prove to be his undoing. The unravelling of the now unbelievable Cleggmania of 2010 after the Liberal Democrats formed a coalition government surely stands as the starkest example of the danger. Does that not worry him? “No, not at all,” Klaver says. “This is the nature of working together.

“I am always talking about the government I am looking forward to: a centre-left government, with social democrats, the socialists, the Christian democrats, even the liberals of [the] D66 [party].

“I believe cooperation is necessary to achieve our goals of change. What I am not going to compromise are my principles. I want to ensure we have a more equal society, I want to make sure that we fight inequality. But I can think of 50 ways to do it. The ways to do it are negotiable for me. Not the principle itself.”

Along with the collapse of the Dutch Labour vote from about 25% to as little as 8%, another ingredient of Klaver’s success is the stark contrast he offers to Wilders. Klaver says that in his dealings with the leader of the PVV, who was convicted of racist speech in December, he tries to keep things civil. But asked whether the rhetoric Wilders aimed at Moroccans had ever touched him personally, given his family roots, there is a discernible edge to the response. “No, only when... Most of the time not,” Klaver says, pausing. “Only once. I am a father of two sons. One and three years old. When the oldest was a couple of weeks old he [Wilders] yelled in this cafe ‘less, less Moroccans’. It was why he was in court.

“I thought how far are you going? Are you talking about me? Are you talking about my son? I think I was a little bit emotional because I had just become a dad. That was the only time.”

Whether the many moving parts of the Dutch elections do give Klaver his big moment, perhaps most likely as a junior partner in a Rutte government, as a student of politics he believes it is his movement that is the hope of the left, across Europe, including in the UK. “I am interested in politics so I look to what is happening in the UK, France and the United States. And I was watching [Jeremy] Corbyn too and I think it was impressive what he did in the internal [election]. But when you look to his programme it is, you know, back to the future,” he says.

“That is the big difference between us. We have a very modern programme and it is all doable. It is very ambitious, but we can manage it.

“He [Corbyn] was talking about opening the mines again, stuff like it. That’s a problem for social democrats. Most of the time they choose to go back. I think it was a great thing he [Corbyn] said: ‘the third way was the wrong way’. I think he is correct but going back before the third way is maybe even worse. You have to go forward. You have to learn.”

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