I am also glad to see them win. I don't like to see governments railroad people without any compromise. It was "our way, or the highway". That's not constructive. 'Bout time the "small guy" (compared to the gov) won.
The 'small guy' are a couple of extremely rich cattle feed producers (in fact in the top 10 richest families in the country) which financed a succesfull propaganda campaign to derail this extremely necessarry piece of legislation. It is a damn shame that american type populist and big money financed misinformation campaigns are coming to the Netherlands as well...
Well, for a couple of rich guys, they seem to be the majority party in the senate.
Compared to the government, perhaps, but there are some very big companies behind the protests, and independent farmers don't necessarily agree.
They had literally 50 years to compromise. The first time this problem came up was in the 1970s.