Brussels struggles to placate farmers as far right stokes protests

EU farmers egged on by the far right have taken to spreading muck outside government buildings, barricading roads and creating widespread havoc as Brussels fights to keep the agriculture sector on board with its green transition.

In an effort to placate farmers and neutralise a campaign issue ahead of June’s European parliament elections, Ursula von der Leyen, opened “strategic dialogues” with 27 delegates from farming groups, NGOs and financial institutions on Thursday.

“We all have the same sense of urgency that things have to improve, that we have to find a new way forward, and common and lasting solutions for the problems that you are very much aware of,” the European Commission president said.

The protests are in large part driven by dissatisfaction with policymakers who prioritise cutting carbon emissions and preserving biodiversity over supplying consumers with homegrown food.

Farmers are particularly angry with the bloc’s “farm-to-fork” strategy and other regulations they say damage their competitiveness against imports, even as they struggle with inflation and more extreme weather.

“We don’t have much faith,” said Ana Mahe of Farmers’ Alliance Ireland, at a protest outside the EU parliament in Brussels on Wednesday. The demonstration was organised by MCC Brussels, a think-tank backed by the arch-Eurosceptic Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and chaired by his political director Balazs Orbán, of no relation. “We are here to create a coalition of farmers in Europe,” Mahe said.

The most violent clashes have occurred in France, where farmers have barricaded motorways, causing a deadly accident, and a radical group of wine producers set off a bomb outside a regional government building in the southern city of Carcassonne.

The German government’s attempts to scrap an agricultural diesel subsidy, an edict to cull cattle herds in Ireland and an influx of Ukrainian grain into neighbouring EU countries has further infuriated the sector.

Farmers drive their tractors near the Reichstag in Berlin, partly in protest at the German government’s attempts to scrap a diesel subsidy © Tobias Schwarz/AFP/Getty Images

Agriculture contributed 1.4 per cent to the EU’s gross domestic product in 2022, according to the commission, but it employs some 8.7mn people, many of which are in eastern and southern Europe.

The EU’s €387bn flagship Common Agricultural Policy, a framework of subsidies for farmers, accounts for around a third of the bloc’s 2021-27 joint budget.

Claus Hochrein, a farmer from Eisenheim in Bavaria, said the subsidy cut was the last straw but rising bureaucracy was also a problem, such as tougher EU rules on the use of fertilisers and pesticides. “In the last few years the government has talked to the NGOs, they’ve talked to each other, over our heads, and never with us — and that has to change.”

Guillaume Dumoulin, who runs an organic hemp farm in Deux-Sevres in eastern France, said farming “is a risky business in which it’s hard to make a predictable living”. “We are no longer guaranteed to see the harvest purchased at a consistent price that allows us to cover production costs,” he said.

Yet there is another undercurrent: liberal and leftwing politicians fear that rural groups are being radicalised by far-right parties and Eurosceptic groups prepared to grasp any cause as a way to infiltrate mainstream politics ahead of EU elections in June.

In Poland, protests sparked by the glut of Ukrainian grain have been seized upon by the far-right Confederation party, which is looking to rebound this year in local and EU elections after falling short in October’s vote for the national parliament.

Confederation leaders have travelled on several occasions to border areas to show their support for rural voters and condemn the EU for being both too generous to Ukraine and too harsh on Polish businesses.

The Brussels protest was also attended by French politician Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, the niece of Marine Le Pen, from the far-right Rassemblement National and rightwing European parliament lawmakers.

Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, niece of the far-right French politician Marine Le Pen, joins a farmers’ protest near the European parliament in Belgium © Yves Herman/Reuters

Edwige Diaz, an MP from the RN in the French parliament from the Gironde region of south-west France, said their message of defending farmers from the excesses of Brussels regulation and unbridled globalisation was hitting home.

“We want to cancel the EU’s farm-to-fork strategy, which would drastically cut farm yields in the name of preserving nature and the planet, yet make us more reliant on imports that do not respect any such rules,” she said. “Farmers will have little hope of things changing unless those in government are replaced.”

A poll published by the European Council on Foreign Relations think-tank this week showed that the far-right Identity and Democracy Group (ID), which includes the RN and Alternative for Germany party, could go from being the fifth to the third-largest bloc in the EU parliament this year.

Mahe said that Farmers’ Alliance Ireland had registered to run as a political party in Ireland and in the EU elections because farmers felt that mainstream politics had ceased to represent them.

Dickens Bart, a dairy farmer and president of the Farmers Defence Force Belgium, said protests could become more violent as elections approach. The politicians “don’t do anything and it seems like they don’t want to listen. So we must do something . . . we don’t have anything to lose. And that’s dangerous. The man who has nothing to lose.”

At a gathering of EU agriculture ministers on Tuesday, several accused the commission of being too slow to act after a dialogue with farmers was announced in Von der Leyen’s annual policy speech in September.

Dutch agriculture minister Piet Adema, whose Christian Union party suffered in the Dutch elections in favour of the upstart BBB farmers movement and far-right firebrand Geert Wilders last November, said: “The most important thing is to involve and reach out to farmers. We shouldn’t just talk about farmers. We need to talk with them.”

Bram Van Hecke, a Belgian farmer who plans to run in the EU elections, said that the farmers’ struggle was not against what was needed to counter climate change but against top-down legislation.

“The government is harsh in saying these are the rules, the market is harsh and you are right in the middle and that pressure has gone up to a very high level . . . the cri du coeur of the farmers is not a far-right cri du coeur. It is one from the heart.”

Additional reporting by Raphael Minder in Warsaw and Marton Dunai in Budapest