Tractor protesters are holding Brussels hostage – and winning

Brussels’s climbdown on net zero rules for farmers will not stuff the Eurosceptic genie back into the bottle. Polls predict anti-eu parties will win June’s European Parliament elections in nine member states – Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Slovakia.

Now fully emerged from their defensive crouch after Britain’s painful Brexit negotiations, they are set to come second or third in another nine EU countries. The EU fears that those results could be boosted by the farmers’ populist revolt.

Tractor protests against climate rules handed a Dutch farmer’s party a landslide victory in regional elections last year after the vote became a referendum on establishment politics.

After the ruling coalition collapsed, voters turned to Geert Wilders, an anti-migrant, Nexit-backing, farmer-supporting firebrand in November’s snap general election.

Copycat tractor protests have since been held in France, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Poland and Romania, are expected soon in Slovakia and erupted in Spain yesterday.

Eurosceptic parties have adopted the farmer’s fight, robbing pro-eu forces of a constituency it has long regarded as its own thanks to the bloc’s huge agricultural subsidies. A key battleground is the pushback against the EU’S 2050 net zero target, given impetus by the cost of living crisis.

Europe’s farmers are also anxious about competition with cheap agricultural imports from Ukraine after the EU waived trade restrictions. They have thrown a spanner into the works of the bloc’s free trade negotiations with the Mercosur bloc of South American countries.

This is a problem for Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president who spearheaded the net zero push. Five years ago, her appointment was approved by just nine votes after she relied on Green support to secure the job.

Now her own centre-right European People’s Party, long the parliament’s biggest group, is courting the farmers by getting tough on environmental legislation. The Eurosceptic surge, like those before it, could be contained by an alliance of pro-eu parties, which will still be in the majority after the elections. The European People’s Party simply has to forgo the temptation to form a coalition with Eurosceptic parties to limit the influence of the likes of Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orban and Mr Wilders.

But Mrs von der Leyen has wilted under the pressure of her political family and shelved or weakened new EU green laws. Agriculture is responsible for 11 per cent of EU greenhouse gas emissions and 54 per cent of its polluting methane emissions. removing farming from a plan to cut emissions by 90 percent by 2040 is a huge concession to the sector, which represents just 1.5 per cent of EU GDP. Services represent 64.7 per cent of EU GDP, while manufacturing is 23.8per cent.

Allowing agriculture, which benefits from a third of the EU’S budget – €386billion over seven years – to force a more protectionist trade policy is equally astounding.

Mrs von der Leyen’s about-turn is a sign of weakness and will not stop the tractor protests.

The farmers are holding the EU hostage and they are winning.