The far right’s stunning victory in the Netherlands’s parliamentary elections last fall will upset far more than the country’s immigration policies. An agreement by the four parties aiming to form a new government, presented on 16 May and debated in the House of Representatives on 22 May, also calls for cuts in science and innovation funding, rollbacks of environment and climate policies, and restrictions on the influx of foreign students.
Scientists and their advocates are dismayed. “As a country we’re falling further behind if we implement these cuts,” Marcel Levi, chair of a broad group of institutes and companies known as the Knowledge Coalition, said in a statement. Jouke de Vries, interim chair of Universities of the Netherlands, called the cuts “a blow to our students and employees, who are already under enormous pressure.”
The nationalist, populist Party for Freedom, led by Geert Wilders, won 23% of the vote in the November 2023 House elections, putting Wilders—once a fringe figure who proposed a “head rag tax” on women wearing headscarves—close to the center of power. Since then, Wilders has been in contentious and often chaotic negotiations to form a government with three other parties, including the center-right party led by outgoing Prime Minister Mark Rutte, which saw its electoral share shrink to 15%. The governing plan endorsed by the four parties, which marks a crucial step in forming a new government, includes a series of harsh anti-immigration measures. Centrist and left-wing parties fiercely criticized the plan during this week’s debate.
The plan, titled “Hope, Courage, and Pride,” calls for cutting taxes, investing in housing, and bolstering support for farmers. It would scrap the final two rounds—together worth €6.8 billion—of the National Growth Fund, a 5-year scheme launched in 2021 to boost innovation and economic growth by disbursing a total of €20 billion to consortia of research organizations and companies. The fund’s first three rounds supported dozens of projects, for example to boost the biotech sector, innovate in education, make the steel industry greener, and create a Centre for Animal-Free Biomedical Translation.
The cut is “shocking, because it will hurt the country’s potential for innovation,” says chemist and 2016 Nobel Prize winner Ben Feringa of the University of Groningen, who sits on the fund’s advisory council. “It’s not a very smart strategy if you think about the problems we have to solve as a society.”
The agreement also puts an end to the so-called Sector Plans, a scheme launched in 2023 that spends €200 million annually to reduce academic workloads, provide jobs at universities and academic medical centers, and structure the division of labor between institutes. And the parties agreed to cut €150 million annually from a $500 million fund to advance basic research.
Both those schemes were introduced by Robbert Dijkgraaf, a physicist and former head of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who became science minister in 2022 and enjoyed broad support from the academic community. “It pains my heart to see that plans are being made to roll back many of these investments,” Dijkgraaf said in a parliament debate on 21 May. “It feels as if we were at the head of the peloton, and now are hitting the brakes.”
The new coalition has also vowed to slow a recent influx of foreign students—roughly one in four bachelor’s and master’s students now comes from abroad—which has exacerbated housing shortages and triggered complaints about the second-class position of Dutch in higher education. The coalition wants more courses taught in Dutch instead of English, a cap on the number of foreign students, and higher tuition fees for people from outside the European Union. Those measures threaten “the international character” of Dutch higher education, de Vries said in his statement. “That has major consequences for the availability of talent for science and the labor market.”
Another sharp turn comes in environmental policy. The Netherlands, a major agricultural exporter, has more farm animals per square kilometer than any other country in Europe, and their waste emits high levels of nitrogen compounds that violate EU rules and harm the country’s ecosystems. Past government plans to tackle the issue have triggered massive protests by farmers and the rise of a new party, the Farmer-Citizen Movement, that won 4.7% of the vote and is part of the new coalition.
The coalition will relax limits on nitrogen emissions from farms and ask Brussels for exemptions from EU manure and nitrogen rules—a plan observers say is unlikely to succeed. And the parties will scrap a €20 billon fund to make agriculture more sustainable by buying out farmers, as well as a rule setting a lower daytime speed limit on highways, which was introduced in 2020 to help reduce nitrogen emissions.
Wilders, who ardently denies climate science, called in his election platform for putting all climate policies and agreements “through the shredder,” but he conceded in Parliament that won’t happen. The governing agreement leaves most climate “nonsense” in place, he said. A proposed carbon dioxide tax for industry and a plan to speed up the introduction of heat pumps in homes have both been abandoned, however.
Wilders’s next job is to propose a prime minister. Until a few days ago, Ronald Plasterk, a molecular biologist profiled by Science in 2003, was the top contender. Plasterk, who served as science and education minister for the Labor Party from 2007 to 2010 and as interior minister after that, has moved to the right politically and reportedly enjoys good relations with Wilders. He led the negotiations between the four parties in December 2023 and January. But Plasterk withdrew from consideration as prime minister on 20 May after a media frenzy erupted over his involvement in a patent dispute.
The dispute involved a company, Frame, that Plasterk co-founded after his political career ended in 2017. It aimed to develop off-the-shelf personalized cancer vaccines based on so-called frameshift mutations. The German RNA biotech CureVac bought Frame, including its patent portfolio, in 2022 for €32 million. Several stories in Dutch newspaper NRC have suggested that one or more researchers at the University of Amsterdam were involved in developing the ideas underlying Frame’s approach and should have been included in patents that list Plasterk as the sole inventor. The newspaper has not provided clear evidence of wrongdoing, but the university is investigating the matter.
In a statement published on Monday, Plasterk said the stories were “incorrect” and he had acted with “complete integrity,” but that he was no longer available to lead a new Cabinet. Wilders, whose future governing partners don’t want him to become prime minister, is now looking for a new candidate.
