Why Europe’s Far Right is Aligning with Farmers’ Protests
Since January, farmers across Europe have taken to the streets to protest. Throwing eggs, blaring horns and sparking fires, tractors have lined the streets of European capital cities seeking for their demands to be met. Border crossings have been blocked as forms of protest, causing delays within the Netherlands in Zandvliet, Meer and Postel. Farmers in France have done likewise: blocking highways in cities such as Lyon and Toulouse and lining Parisian streets with manure.
The farmer’s revolt represents the culmination of Europe (and the world’s) most pressing problems: the climate crisis, the war in Ukraine, and the growing popularity of the far right. Due to the war in Ukraine, costs of energy, fertiliser and transport have risen. Data from Eurostat shows that the prices farmers receive for their products has been slowly decreasing since 2022, with an average decline of nearly 9% between the third quarter of 2022 and 2023. Moreover, the waived quotas and duties on Ukrainian imports has results in unfair competition on agricultural products such as grain. European farmers point to this as another reason for their anger.
The European Green Deal includes measures such as a tax on carbon, pesticide bans, nitrogen emission curbs and restrictions on water and land usage. What farmer’s stress is that the sustainability of European farming cannot be separated from the continuing nature of international competitiveness. In other words, while producing in a way that is more environmentally friendly, farmers’ cost rise while governments have reduced food prices to accommodate for the cost-of-living crisis’ effect on consumers. So, facing falling prices and rising costs, farmers have taken the streets to protest.
The EU, in response, has been seen as raising the white flag. Brussels has rescinded plans, delayed projects or remained quiet on the specifics of how farming will be affected by future strategies. For instance, a delay was given to rules which would have forced farmers to set aside a percentage of land to promote soil health and biodiversity. Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission, announced that the halving of pesticide use across the EU is to be scrapped in response to the grievances made obvious by the protests. Even at a local level, governments have tried to placate farmers by going back on previous statements. Berlin has now said that a car tax exemption for farming vehicles would be kept and reductions in diesel tax breaks would be spread over three years.
Riding piggyback on the protests, far right politicians have aligned themselves with the farmers to help their popularity come the impending European Parliament June elections. They have done so by stressing three aspects of the farmers’ grievances: Europe as a regime imposing on unwilling nation states, populist rhetoric of an elite oppressing the rural people and the sacrifices needed for the climate crisis. Most farmers don’t desire to become the political far right’s scapegoat. Yet, there has been growing success in national polls across Europe. In January, a survey from the European Council on Foreign Relations demonstrated that far-right parties placed first in nine EU countries and were growing in number of seats in the European Parliament. In the Netherlands, the Farmer-Citizen Movement Party (BBB) has utilised anti-system and anti-ecology rhetoric to gain more votes. As a result, they increased their seats in parliament from one to seven. Stressing how Brussels is imposing free trade policies upon them, favouring out-of-Europe nations for trade, there is a chance that, in the upcoming elections of the European Parliament in June, the far right will continue to find success.
Yet, the more pressing issue, that of global rising temperatures, can only be mitigated if European politicians explain the pressing nature of the climate crisis and thus, how policies that need to be enacted may cause dissatisfaction. This, paired with decreasing levels of trust in politicians, is not a recipe for success. However, what remains obvious is that scrapping environmental protections will not only weaken the left against the rise of the right but also be a blow to any progress towards fighting climate change. It is a difficult future that we face, as the EU tries to placate the farmers who are being pulled towards the far right while simultaneously facing backlash for not pushing towards the target of reaching net zero by 2050. What remains to be answered is whether the EU will face greater peril ignoring agricultural grievances or failing to address climate change.
Image courtesy of Luis Miguel Caceres via Getty Images, ©2024. Some rights reserved.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the wider St. Andrews Foreign Affairs Review team.
