French farmers are threatening to take their tractor protests to the heart of the European Union and impose a blockade on Brussels as they have done to Paris in opposition to the green agenda favoured by globalists like President Emmanuel Macron.
The farmer uprising in France continued to grow this week, as an estimated 12,000 farmers in over 6,000 tractors enacted roadblocks in at least 120 locations throughout France on Tuesday, including access points to major cities such as Paris, Lyon and Marseilles. However, some are calling for the protests to set their sights on the EU government.
“The next step is Brussels, that’s for sure,” a grain grower from Loiret told the Le Figaro newspaper, with another adding: “We are able to go to Brussels, that doesn’t scare us.”
Motivated by the climate change agenda and expansionist visions, the EU has gone from being the friend to farmers as it was in decades past and is slowly becoming a major foe of agriculture, imposing onerous environmental regulations on agriculture while at the same time allowing food produced cheaper in other parts of the world without such stringent standards to freely flow into Europe, and thereby undercutting local farmers.
Defending the system he has been integral in creating, French President Emmanuel Macron said that “it would be easy to blame everything on Europe”.
Macron, who left the country for a state visit to Sweden on Tuesday despite the national crisis, did admit that the decision by Brussels to grant Ukrainian agriculture tariff-free access has had negative ramifications on farmers throughout the bloc.
“We have asked to have clear measures on imports from Ukraine because today we have things in volume and quality that are destabilising the European market, whether it comes to chickens or cereals,” he said per The Telegraph.
Meanwhile, Gabriel Attal, who was made the country’s youngest ever prime minister after being installed by Macron earlier this month, said that France would oppose the planned free trade deal between the EU and the South American ‘Mercosur’ nations of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, in a signal that the orthodoxy upholding free trade as a bedrock economic principle may be eroding in Europe.
Following his trip to Sweden, Macron will head to Brussels for crunch talks with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to discuss what measures can be taken to appease the growing farmer protest movement.
The embattled French president will be preceded by his minister of agriculture, Marc Fesneau, who is travelling to the defacto EU capital today “for a series of talks aimed at accelerating the treatment of European emergencies”.
The issues facing European farmers, such as the rising cost of fuel, high taxes, excessive government-required paperwork, the war in Ukraine, free trade, and green agenda regulations are set to be a major factor in the European Parliament elections in June and likely serving to bolster pro-farmer populist parties, which had already begun to surge over growing discontent with the open borders migration agenda of the globalist parties that have dominated European politics over the past decade.
Farmer’s uprisings have already seen political success in Europe, notably in the Netherlands, where the upstart tractor protest Farmer Citizen Movement party became the largest force in the Dutch senate last year and is likely to be a coalition partner of the presumptive prime minister, populist firebrand Geert Wilders, who has also aligned himself with the cause of the farmers.
Currently, there are active farmer protest movements in France, Germany, Poland and Romania. This week, farmers’ organisations in Spain said that they would be joining in on the action against over-regulation from Brussels.