AMSTERDAM — Frans Timmermans wants a top job in Brussels. But he’s got a problem: Brussels.

In an election in which his center-left Labor Party is on track to take yet another historic drubbing, the Dutch vice president of the European Commission’s close connection to the EU capital is turning into a liability.

Timmermans’ profile — he’s a multilingual former foreign minister and the European Socialists & Democrats group’s nominee for Commission president — plays into his opponents’ attempts to cast him as the Dutch personification of bureaucratic Brussels and their effort to turn the European Parliament election into a de facto referendum on the European Union.

Brexit has defanged efforts to pull the Netherlands out of the EU. A recent I&O poll indicated just a third of respondents want a referendum on membership, and that if such a vote took place just 18 percent would vote to leave.

But Brussels-bashing remains a national sport, ever more so as the radical right climbs the national polls. The upstart Forum for Democracy party — running on a nationalist, anti-immigration, climate-skeptic platform — is projected to come first in the election on May 23, with 17 percent of the vote.

That’s far ahead of Timmermans’ Labor Party. Once one of the country’s major political forces, capable of raking in 30 percent of the vote, Timmermans’ party is expected to come in fifth with less than 8 percent of the vote — putting it not far ahead of the single-issue Party for Animals, which is polling at 5 percent.

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Such a result would make Timmermans just one of two MEPs his party would send to Brussels.

Dutch Euroskeptics are trying to turn the electoral contest “into a referendum on: ‘Do we want more EU, or less EU?’” said Jaap Stronks, a digital strategist whose agency built the online campaign structure for the European and Dutch Greens. “I do understand their strategy, and I think they will partly succeed.

“On the national stage, it’s Frans Timmermans … who personifies the EU,” Stronks added.

Brussels man

Timmermans’ Brussels CV has put him in the crosshairs of both sides of the spectrum.

Last week, the Socialist Party put out a video featuring “Hans Brusselmans,” a Timmermans lookalike who toys with EU tanks on the floor of a mansion in his underpants, while a voice-over talks of his large salary and condescension toward Dutch voters.

In one scene, Brusselmans tosses the results of a Dutch referendum into his fireplace, then leans back and cackles in his armchair. “Even if the French and the Dutch reject his European constitution, Hans and his Brussels mates still find a way to push it through,” the video voice-over states.

The reference is to the 2005 referendum, when Dutch voters rejected changes to a treaty enshrining a European constitution that would have furthered integration.

The referendum was the first held by the modern Dutch state, and it marked the first major victory of Euroskeptic populism.

“The message was, if this constitution passes, the Netherlands will sink into the North Sea,” recalled political historian Ewout Klei of the No campaign.

Dutch voters rejected the constitution by 62 percent. Timmermans, who was then an MP and a prominent campaigner in favor of the changes, took the result as a major personal blow.

“My initial reaction was, ‘I should leave politics, I got it all wrong,’” he told the Financial Times. The vote also foreshadowed the collapse of Timmermans’ Labor Party, which saw a dramatic drop in support at the European Parliament election in 2009.

For the Socialists, the Brusselmans video was a success, kickstarting what had been a moribund campaign, spreading virally on social media and becoming the dominant topic in Dutch political talk shows and news coverage.

“[Timmermans] is a token, or a good example, of the current European decision-makers,” said Socialist lawmaker Peter Kwint. “Their response to any problem is more Europe, and if they don’t see a problem, they will find a reason for more Europe.”

Timmermans is viewed as being on the right of his party, and bad blood with the Socialists runs deep. In 2012, he was nicknamed “Brutus” for his role in the downfall of a Labor Party leader who was perceived to be taking the party to the left, or in Timmermans’ words, “SP-light.”

Labor MEP Kati Piri, who is fourth on her party’s list for the election, accused the Socialists of playing into the hands of the right.

One poll indicated the video was even more popular with the radical right than with Socialists.

“I think the right wing are having a party that the left wing among themselves are doing this kind of campaigning,” she said.

Not from the Berlaymont

It’s perhaps no surprise that Timmermans kicked off his own campaign by emphasizing his connections not to the Commission’s Berlaymont building in Brussels but to his Dutch home turf, the old coal mining district of Heerlen.

“Everyone must come from somewhere. I come from here,” he told the crowd of Labor activists on the terrace of the Heerlen café where he held his campaign launch. “I am not from the Berlaymont Europe, from Brussels, from Strasbourg. I am from this Europe.”

Timmermans hails from the province of Limburg, a narrow strip of Dutch land hemmed in between Germany and Belgium. And he wants voters to know it: he is a famously vocal supporter  of local second division football team Roda JC.

His speeches often begin with family stories he uses to tell the story of Europe: The socialist miner grandfather, who lived to proudly see his grandson graduate from university; the mother who watched from a hill as British bombs burned the nearby German city of Aachen; the military policeman father who patrolled borders his grandchildren have never known.

Timmermans’ international life started early. He attended a Belgian primary school, French-speaking scouts, an English international school in Rome, a Heerlen high school, and universities in the Netherlands and France, gathering a famously long roster of languages. He added Russian during his military service.

He would go on to become a diplomat, a lawmaker and then a popular foreign minister who documented his globetrotting to a large Facebook following and clearly enjoyed the job. (“I was in the shower yesterday, and I had to say to myself: you really are minister for foreign affairs,” he said after taking the role.)

Polyglot

Timmermans’ career has been continually bolstered by his abilities as a communicator, which have given him a high profile in numerous countries.

Unlike most of his rival candidates for the European Parliament, Timmermans is known to a solid majority of Dutch voters. (Malik Azmani of the ruling People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy is close to unknown; Indeed, one in 10 of the party’s supporters believe Timmermans to be its candidate.)

In addition to speaking German, French, Italian, Russian, and English, Timmermans is noted for his command of local Dutch dialects.

“Whether we went to Rotterdam to speak with dock workers, or a reception with ambassadors, Frans always managed to speak the correct tone and language and connect with very different audiences,” recalled Piri, who first worked for Timmermans as a student intern.

His candidness and eloquence too have made him stick out. In 2002, as sexual abuse scandals began to envelop the Catholic Church, Timmermans spoke out about his own experience of abuse at the hands of a priest, saying he had been inspired by the bravery of other victims.

In the Netherlands, he remains best known for a seven-minute speech he made while foreign minister in response to the shooting down of civilian passenger flight MH17 by Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine in 2014.

“The demise of almost 200 of my compatriots has left a hole in the heart of the Dutch nation,” he said with a cool, precise delivery. “Did they lock hands with their loved ones, did they hold their children close to their hearts, did they look each other in the eyes, one final time, in a wordless goodbye?”

Culture war

There are two ways of seeing Frans Timmermans. Supporters see his multilingualism as a strength. To opponents, it reads as elitist and arrogant. What he calls experience, others view as too much time in the Brussels bubble.

In the Dutch culture war, Timmermans represents the perfect antagonist: sophisticated, multilingual, and a veteran of rule-of-law disputes with Eastern European sovereigntists that have left him with a reputation as the consummate Berlaymont scold.

Timmermans, for his part, sees Europe as divided into two groups, who look on the same subjects and see different things. He doesn’t call them Euroskeptics and Europhiles, or people from “somewhere” versus people from “anywhere,” but optimists and pessimists.

“There’s two big groups in European society,” he told a recent interviewer (Timmermans did not respond to a request for interview for this article).

“If you’re optimistic and you understand you’re in one boat with all these Europeans, you think ‘that’s an opportunity to solve problems together.’ If you’re pessimistic, and you don’t really have this feeling of trust vis-à-vis your fellow Europeans but you know you’re in the same boat, it makes you fearful.”

His campaign has been an obstacle course, as he flits through countries and languages in an effort to stem the Continent-wide collapse of the traditional European social democrat parties he represents. This week takes him to the Netherlands, Italy, Belgium, Germany, and back to the Netherlands again, sometimes with appointments in multiple countries on a single day.

According to Klei, the historian, Timmermans fits into a tradition of Labor politicians who are most comfortable in international roles, making him an ill-fit for current times.

“Some politicians are too big for the Netherlands,” Klei said. “Dutch people view Dutch politicians as those who represent Dutch interests, not the bigger interests in the world.”