The Big Impact Farmer Protests Could Have on Europe’s Elections This Year
Farmers across Europe have been sticking it to the authorities over the past month, sometimes literally. Agrarian protesters showered police with liquid manure and eggs outside European Union headquarters in Brussels last week.
Farmers taking grievances to the streets is nothing new, in Europe or elsewhere. But this wave threatens pillars of EU environmental and foreign policy. It could help far-right parties grab a quarter of the European Parliament in elections this June, on current polling.
“The EU’s Green Deal will have to change to survive,” says Eoin Drea, senior researcher at the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies. “Centrist parties don’t want to lose the rural vote like the Democrats did in America.”
Agriculture is an underrecognized contributor to pollution and climate change around the world. In Europe, the sector emits nearly two-thirds as much carbon as transportation, Drea says.
Von der Leyen, hoping the next European parliament will hand her a second term, has backpedaled fast. Last month she proposed freezing the pesticide reduction plan. Her commission opened exemptions to the 4% fallow requirement. “Our farmers deserve to be listened to,” she told legislators.
“We have seen a U-turn away from an ambitious Green Deal,” laments Ineke Maes, an adviser to the Belgian Better Environment Federation.
The Green Deal is one focus of European farmers’ complaints. The other is cheap imports. The EU’s long-pending free trade deal with South America’s Mercosur bloc, which includes agri-powerhouses Brazil and Argentina, is a likely casualty.
“It is impossible to conclude talks in these conditions,” an adviser to French President Emmanuel Macron told reporters in late January.
A more sensitive subject is Ukraine. The EU waived numerous tariffs on the onetime breadbasket of Europe after Russia’s invasion two years ago. That brought cut-price flows of grain and poultry, particularly irritating farmers in former East Bloc countries that most strongly support Kyiv politically.
That’s led Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, among other leaders, into a delicate dance. “The interests of Ukrainian agro-holdings cannot override the interests of Europe and our farmers,” he declared after meeting Polish agrarians on Feb. 29. Literally in the same breath he added: “This has nothing to do with Ukraine’s security.”
Rumors of Green Europe’s death should not be exaggerated. The U.S. spews 50% more carbon dioxide relative to gross domestic product than Germany, more than twice as much as France, by United Nations figures.
Flying manure and heated elections don’t create the best environment for hashing out the complex way forward, though. ‘Some of the things we need to compromise about are getting lost in rhetoric,” says Justin Zahra, director of the EU agricultural program at the Environmental Defense Fund.