Frans Timmermans, the architect of the EU Green Deal vying to lead the Netherlands

August 22, 2023

Polyglot and tenacious negotiator, the Dutchman Frans Timmermans, as vice-president of the European Commission, defended the ambitious EU Green Deal in the face of growing resistance – a role he has just left to try to become Prime minister in the Netherlands.

Mr Timmermans, 62, was inducted on Tuesday to head a joint Social Democratic Party (PvdA) and Greens (GroenLinks) list for the Dutch snap election in the fall, with hopes of succeeding liberal Mark Rutte, a scrutinized vote less than a year from the European elections.

In the aftermath, the Commission announced the resignation of its vice-president.

In Brussels, he has been the architect and emblematic spokesperson for the environmental policies undertaken since 2019 under the aegis of the conservative president of the European executive, Ursula von der Leyen.

This report will be invited in the campaign in the Netherlands, where his profile feeds the lawsuits in “disconnection” and where he will rub shoulders with the Movement of farmers-citizens, recently gained power by surfing on the peasant protest against European regulations.

The departure of Frans Timmermans comes just as negotiations on the Green Pact are running out of steam, with some states and right-wing MEPs calling for a “pause” in environmental legislation.

An ex-diplomat with an imposing stature and a white beard, Mr. Timmermans joined the Commission of the conservative Jean-Claude Juncker in Brussels in 2014, who made him his right arm, but only granted him limited room for maneuver, arousing his bitterness.

In 2019, if he fails to take the helm of the European executive he was running for on behalf of the Socialists, he becomes the vice-president in charge of the flagship project of the “Green Deal”, an arsenal of measures aimed at slashing EU carbon emissions.

He deploys his oratorical and linguistic talents (he speaks English, French, German, Italian and Russian, in addition to his mother tongue) to negotiate, in pain, this sprawling plan.

The climate measures he proposes in mid-2021 (reform of the carbon market to apply it to housing, end of new cars with combustion engines in 2035, etc.) immediately arouse strong objections, in particular on the impact for low-income households and the risk of a possible social revolt.

“Everyone is talking about a risk of yellow vests (…) The transition must be fair, but at least take the trouble to analyze our proposal correctly”, he annoys.

In Strasbourg, he quotes Shakespeare (“This era is out of joint”) in the preamble to a long plea. “Climate crisis and risk of ecocide constitute an existential threat”, he insists. Most of the climate plan will be adopted in the spring of 2023, after long talks between States and MEPs.

With his return to the Netherlands, “the EU is losing the visionary mastermind behind the Green Pact, who fought fossil fuel lobbies and refractory to climate action,” said German Green MEP Michael Bloss.

If the NGOs consider the results obtained “historic”, the Green Pact remains unfinished.

Discussions to reduce pesticides are bogged down, and the future of a key text for biodiversity (“nature restoration law”) remains uncertain after violent exchanges in the European Parliament, where the European People’s Party (EPP , right) largely watered down the project in July.

The EPP makes the Dutchman a scarecrow, the preferred target of its attacks, accusing him of threatening European agricultural sovereignty or even of wanting to raze the Finnish city of Santa Claus to return land to nature…

“It saddens me to see climate policy suffer from cultural battles. When the opposition becomes tribal, the facts no longer matter,” sighed Frans Timmermans in June.

Also supervising the EU climate negotiations, he had multiplied the trips for the COP28, recently in China.

Father of four children, this football and cycling enthusiast (he claims to cycle to work) is known to be reserved in private. Born in 1961 in Maastricht, this grandson of miners from a Catholic family has spent most of his life abroad.

After a childhood between Brussels and Rome, studies of French literature and a course of European law in Nancy, in the east of France, he made a career in diplomacy – in particular in the embassy in Moscow -, before becoming a parliamentarian, secretary of Minister for European Affairs then Minister for Foreign Affairs (2012-2014).

He distinguished himself with a moving speech at the United Nations after the crash of flight MH17, shot down over Ukraine in 2014, which killed 298 people, including 193 Dutch.