The snowballing protests by French farmers, now spreading across the country after beginning with roadblocks in the south-west last week, are the latest in a Europe-wide series that reflects a clear malaise among much of the continent’s agricultural sector.
In France, the eruption of the demonstrations has come after long-simmering discontent over falling income. Farmers complain of ever tighter margins demanded of them by agribusinesses and retail chains, while the rise in energy costs was added to with an increase this month in tax on diesel fuel for agricultural vehicles and machines. Another complaint that has been voiced over recent days is about the increasing number of requirements placed on farmers by environmental protection rules, which some regard as punitive.
The protest movement poses a challenge for the government of newly appointed prime minister Gabriel Attal, not only in the short-term with farmers’ threats of blocking Paris and disrupting the yearly agricultural fair that opens in the capital in February, but above all with regard to the European Parliament elections to be held in early June. Those elections have been billed in the French media as essentially a showdown in the country between Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party and the far-right Rassemblement National party (the former Front National) which, with 88 seats in parliament, is the largest single opposition party.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The president of the Rassemblement National (RN), Jordan Bardella, was quick to take advantage of the discontent, travelling on Saturday to a cattle farm in the south-west Médoc region, where he addressed around 40 local farmers. “Macron’s Europe wants the death of our agriculture”, he told them. Locking on to the anger expressed by some against the institutions of the European Union, Bardella declared: “When one makes more of Europe and less of the nation, we weaken ourselves.”
“Every time we open up, it’s systematically to our disadvantage,” said Bardella, targeting both free-trade deals and enlarging the EU to include Ukraine, which he said would herald “the end of French agriculture”.
At a continental scale, the discontent among European farmers was inflamed by the jump in energy prices that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, along with the subsequent importation onto European markets of Ukrainian agricultural products, and the adoption by the European Parliament of the “Green Deal” – a programme aiming to make the EU climate-neutral by the year 2050, and which includes enforced changes to agricultural practices.
But in the detail, the protest movements, which far-right parties are hoping to gain from, are not identical.
In Germany, it was a package of austerity measures introduced in mid-December 2023 by Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition government which prompted a mass movement by farmers protesting notably the ending of tax break subsidies on diesel fuel used in agricultural activity and on the purchasing price of farm vehicles. While the cash-strapped government backtracked on some of the measures, farmers’ associations demand the removal of all of them and have been continuing their roadblocks and rallies.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
In the Netherlands, the initial disgruntlement formed into a movement in October 2019, but spilled over in the summer of 2022 in anger at the government’s plan to halve, by 2030, nitrogen emissions, and nitrous oxide emissions in particular. Livestock farms are a major producer of the gases, which significantly contribute to climate change.
While the Netherlands is one of the world’s largest exporters of agricultural produce, the government set a target of reducing the numbers of livestock by 30%, which for opponents of the plan, and the intensive farming lobby in particular, was an example of punitive environmentalism. In face of the protests, targeting both the EU as much as the Dutch government, prime minister Mark Rutte and his coalition allies were forced into a U-turn.
In the wake of the movement in the Netherlands, farmers in the northern Flanders region of Belgium also began protesting against a broadly similar plan by local government to reduce nitrogen emissions, which included the closing down, with compensation payments, of around 40 pig farms. After months of opposition and political divisions, the regional government finally accepted a compromise deal, to the disappointment of the Greens.
In Spain, it was the exceptional drought conditions last year that prompted farmers’ demands for additional emergency aid, when tractors blocked streets in Madrid in July. In September, farmers demonstrated in the Andalusian city of Córdoba, where a meeting of EU agricultural ministers was being held, to demand extra aid from the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The protesting farmers argued that they faced an increase in production costs brought on by recently adopted EU environmental protection measures (notably legislation to restore damaged ecosystems, approved in November, and some of the details of the new CAP).
In Romania it is the arrival of cheap Ukrainian agricultural produce that prompted farmers to demonstrate in demand of faster compensation payments for those affected by the imports, and also from drought conditions. Their movement, which began on January 10th, was joined by truckers protesting increased taxes, together forming long and slow convoys that converged on the capital Bucharest. Since the Russian blockade of Black Sea ports of neighbouring Ukraine, Romania has become a key transit route for Ukrainian grain, notably via its Black Sea port of Constanta.
Meanwhile, there was similarly motivated joint action by farmers and truckers in Poland who, beginning last November, mounted blockades of border crossings with Ukraine. The blockades were suspended in January.
Enlargement : Illustration 3
Catherine de Vries, a professor of political sciences at Bocconi University in Milan, says caution is needed over the “redistributive effects” of the European Green Deal, and that this was not understood by French President Emmanuel Macron and his entourage when the “yellow vest” revolt erupted in France in 2018. She sees the spread of protests in the agricultural sector as reminiscent of the eclectic “yellow vest” movement, adding that German trades unionists have studied how Dutch farmers won their standoff with the Rutte government in 2022.
“In the case of the Netherlands and [that of] Germany, there is a real empathy of a large section of the population towards the agricultural sector,” she told Mediapart. The demonstrators, she added, are not regarded in the same light as agribusiness industrialists. “They [farmers] are ordinary people who provide what to eat and who would be victims of mistakes in government planning. From that point of view, that has nothing in common with the blockading actions carried out by environmentalists like Extinction Rebellion, who find much less of an echo and sympathy from the population in these two countries.”
Environmental protection measures under fire
The traditional conservative Right is concerned that the protests spreading among the agricultural world will benefit the far-right in June’s European Parliament elections, and in face of that threat it has adopted a harder line against measures in favour of the environment. An example is the campaign led by Manfred Weber, leader in the European Parliament of the conservative European People’s Party group (EPP), and who has been a high-profile opponent of the proposals of the Green Deal.
However, the far-right’s potential gains from the agricultural electorate also vary from one country to another. In the Netherlands, the discontent among farmers led to the creation of an agrarian party, the Farmer-Citizen Movement (in Dutch, BoerBurgerBeweging, or BBB), which won the March 2023 provincial elections, gaining the most seats in all of the country’s 12 provinces.
But in national parliamentary elections in November, the BBB won just seven seats out of a total of 150, while Geert Wilders’ far-right PVV party won 37, the most of any party, after campaigning on a virulent anti-immigration platform. “Many voters switched from the BBB to the PVV,” said Catherine de Vries, “firstly because Wilders gave the impression of softening a little his speech towards the end of the campaign, and also because the campaigning for the legislative elections was not built on the issue of the nitrogen [emissions] plan.”
In Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has high hopes of benefitting from the agricultural unrest, even though Joachim Rukwied, head of the German farmers’ association (DBV), has refuted any links with the far-right.
But an incident earlier this month suggested that some among the protestors are indeed far-right sympathisers. That was when German economy minister and also deputy chancellor, Robert Habeck, a member of the Greens, was unable to disembark from a ferry on January 4th when returning from his holidays in Denmark. That was because a group of between 250 and 300 angry farmers were waiting for him and blocked a jetty in the North Sea port of Schlüttsiel. According to several journalistic investigations, including that by the daily Tageszeitung, the protest was organised via a Telegram group called “the free inhabitants of Schleswig-Holstein”, the state in which Schlüttsiel is situated. The group relays messages of an anti-Semitic and conspiracy theory nature, as well as videos by Martin Sellner, co-founder of the Identitarian Movement of Austria.
Sellner played a key role in the secret meeting held in November by the AfD and other extremists when a plan for the mass deportations of people from Germany was discussed. Beyond the AfD, a string of far-right parties, more or less known, like neo-Nazi group Die Heimat, have given support to the farmers’ revolt.
In Spain, the far-right Vox party has latched onto the discontent among farmers since its creation in 2013. During the parliamentary elections in July 2023, Vox sought to be regarded as the “Spanish agrarian party” by recruiting members of a young farmers’ association as its candidates.
In the Castile and León autonomous region of north-west Spain, where it governs alongside the traditional Right, Vox is a vociferous opponent of the EU Green Deal it says is imposed by “Brussels”, and it champions industrial farms in face of opposition from environmentalists. Like for the BBB in the Netherlands, the party did better in regional elections than in the parliamentary poll.
Meanwhile, Spain’s opposition conservative party, the People’s Party (Partido Popular, or PP) is also keen to appeal to the disgruntled farming population, and so to prevent being overtaken on the issues at stake by the far-right. A prime example was the proposition it made in the spring of 2023, in reaction to the drought in Andalusia, to legalise the until-then illegal artificial wells that were bored by farmers into the water table of the Doñana National Park, a protected nature reserve and UNESCO World Heritage Site, which would threaten the local ecosystem.
-------------------------
- The original French version on which this report is based can be found here, while some added coverage included here is from another article in French, found here.
English version by Graham Tearse