Frustrated farmers rebelling against eurozone regulations
ANDEREN, N ETHERLANDS » I nside the barn on the flat fields of the northern Netherlands, Jos Ubels cradles a newborn Blonde d’aquitaine calf, the latest addition to his herd of more than 300 dairy cattle.
Little could be more idyllic. Little, Ubels said, could be more under threat.
As Europe seeks to address the threat of climate change, it’s imposing more rules on farmers such as Ubels. He spends a day a week on bureaucracy, answering the demands of European Union and national officials who seek to decide when farmers can sow and reap, and how much fertilizer or manure they can use.
Meanwhile, competition from cheap imports is undercutting prices for their produce, without having to meet the same standards. M ainstream political parties failed to act on farmers’ complaints for decades, Ubels said. Now the radical right is stepping in.
Across much of the 27- nation EU, from Finland to Greece, Poland to Ireland, farmers’ discontent is gathering momentum as June E U parliamentary elections draw near.
Ubels is the second in command of the Farmers Defense Force, one of the most prominent groups to emerge from the foment. The FDF, whose s ymbol is a c rossed d ouble pitchfork, was formed in 2019 and has since expanded to Belgium. It has ties to similar groups elsewhere in the EU and is a driving force behind a planned June 4 demonstration in Brussels it hopes will bring 100,000 people to the EU capital and help define the outcome of the elections.
“It is time that we fight back,” Ubels said. “We’re d one with quietly listening and doing what we are told.”
Has he lost trust in democracy? “No. … I have lost my faith in politics. And that is one step removed.”
The FDF itself puts it more ominously on its website: “Our confidence in the rule of law is wavering!”
This story, supported by the Pulitzer C enter for C risis Reporting, i s part of an ongoing Associated Press series covering threats to democracy in Europe.
“Don’t let up”
In March, protesting f armers from Belgium ran amok at a demonstration outside EU headquarters in Brussels, setting fire to a s ubway station entrance and attacking police with eggs and liquid manure. In France, protesters tried to storm a government building.
In a video from another protest, in f ront o f burning tires and pallets, F DF l eader Mark van den Oever said two politicians made him sick to his stomach, saying they would “soon be at the center of attention.” The FDF denies this was a threat of physical violence.
Across the EU, over the winter, tractor convoys blockaded ports and major roads, sometimes for days, in some of the most s evere farm p rotests in half a century.
Farmers and the EU have had a sometimes testy relationship. What’s new is the shift toward the extreme right.
Destitute after World War II and with hunger still a scourge in w inter, Europe desperately needed food security. The EU stepped in, securing abundant food for the population, turning the sector into an export powerhouse and currently funding farmers to the tune of more than $ 53 billion a year.
Yet despite agriculture’s strategic importance, the EU a cknowledges that farmers earn about 40% less than non- farm workers, while 80% of support goes to a privileged 20% of farmers. Many of the bloc’s 8.7 million farm workers are close to or below the poverty line.
At the same time, the EU is seeking to push through stringent nature and agricultural laws as part of its Greendeal tomake the bloc climate- neutral by 2050. Agriculture accounts for more than 10% of Eugreenhouse gas emissions, from sources such as the nitrous oxide in fertilizers, carbon dioxide from vehicles and methane from cattle.
Cutting these emissions has forced short- notice changes on farmers at a time of financial insecurity. The pandemic and surging inf lation have increased the cost of goods and labor, while farmers’ earnings are down as squeezed consumers cut back.
And then there’s the war next door. After Russia’s full- scale invasion in February 2022, the Eugranted tariff- free access for agricultural imports from Ukraine, many of them exempt from the strict environmental standards the bloc enforces on its own producers. Imports surged from$ 7.45 billion in 2021 to almost $ 14 billion the next year, causing gluts and undercutting farmers, particularly in Poland.
“Don’t let up,” Marion Maréchal, the lead candidate for France’s extreme right Reconquest! party in the June elections, exhorted farmers at a protest this year. “You have to be in the streets. You have to make yourself heard. You have to —” she tried to finish the sentence but was drowned out by shouts of “Don’t Let Up! Don’t Let Up!” to. Now, back off,” warned far- right Italian lawmaker Nicola Procaccini in February. In a few months, he said, the European elections “will put people back in place of ideologies.”
Such calls fall on fertile ground. According to predictions by the European Council on Foreign Relations, the radical right Identity and Democracy group could become the third biggest overall in the next European Parliament, behind the Christian Democrats and the Socialists, but edging out the Liberals and Greens.
The farm protests are providing vital leverage. forces in European farming communities: Christianity and conservativism. When Socialism took the big cities, the countryside and its farmers remained staunchly Christian Democrat.
That has changed now. Once, billboards with the cry, “Save our farmers!” would have come from his party; now, they bear the logo of the far- right Flemish Interest, predicted by polls to become the biggest party in Belgium in June.
“In a sense it is only logical that the extreme parties have specialized in capturing that discontent. They call a spade a spade. And that is good,” he said. But farming is complicated, he warned: nature, trade, budgets, commodity prices and geopolitics are all involved. Solutions will have to come from common sense, “not from the extremes.”
Dochy’s Christian Democrats are part of the biggest group in the Euparliament,
the European People’s Party, once a strong proponent of the EU’S Green Deal. Farmers, after all, are among the biggest losers from climate change, affected at different times by flooding, wildfires, drought and extreme temperatures.
But ever since the demonstrations started, EU politics on agriculture and climate have shifted rightward, outraging many of the center right’s old allies with whom it set up the Green Deal. Measures to reduce pesticide use and protect biodiversity have been weakened, while the protesters’ demands to cut regulationhave beenheard.
But as the rhetoric heats up, so too does the climate. Data for early 2024 shows record- breaking temperatures in Europe. In Greece — where an estimated 675 square miles burned in 2023, the worst fire in EU records — wildfires are breaking out, weeks earlier than expected.
The far right offers no detailed solutions to the climate crisis, but it has proved adept at tapping into farmers’ frustrations. In its program for the June elections, the Dutch farright party, the PVV, is short on details but big on slogans about “climate hysteria” and its “tsunami of rules.”
Nature and climate laws, it said, “should not lead to whole sectors being forced into bankruptcy.”
Ubels made the case for farmers’ realpolitik.
“The government doesn’t listen to us, but the opposition does,” he said.