When did it become ‘far-right’ to support European farmers who are fighting for their livelihoods and rural communities? If we were to believe the mainstream media coverage of the farmers’ protests, we might expect to see them marching through Berlin or Paris in jackboots rather than their working bottes en caoutchouc (Wellingtons to us Brits).
The ‘far-right’ political libel against hard-pressed farmers is really a sign of how far the EU elites have lost touch with the reality of life for the peoples of Europe. We should ignore the slurs, and get behind the fighting farmers.
The protests by angry farmers have spread across the European Union, with mighty convoys of tractors blockading roads and cities from Romania to Rome, from Portugal to Poland, from Bulgaria to Brussels and beyond.
There might be some national variations in the farmers’ specific demands. But what unites them all is opposition to the way that the EU elites are subordinating agricultural policy to their Green agenda and Net Zero obsession, leading to more hardship for farmers and higher food prices for other Europeans.
As tractor convoys blockaded German cities in January, farmers’ association president Joachim Rukwied spelt out that they were protesting not just against the government’s proposed cuts in fuel subsidies, but against an EU-wide system where “agricultural policy is being made from an unworldly, urban bubble and against farming families and rural areas.”
This week in Poland, 62-year-old protesting farmer Janusz Bialoskorski told the media that, “They’re talking about climate protection. But why should it be done at farmers’ expense?” Farmers, he pointed out, are not responsible for industrial pollution, and “nor do we fly to Davos on our jets.”
These farmers are now in the front line of a wider populist revolt, against those elitists who DO fly in their private jets to the World Economic Forum in luxurious Davos, Switzerland, where they lecture the rest of us about how to save the planet by sacrificing our living standards.
Their protests expose the yawning gap between the high-minded talk of the Brussels Green oligarchy, and the grim reality of what those Net Zero policies mean for normal people in the muddy fields of Flanders or on the supermarket shelves of Florence.
That is why the fighting farmers have captured the imagination of millions of other hard-working Europeans. And why they have struck fear into the heart of the EU’s political and media powers-that-be, especially in the run-up to June’s elections to the European Parliament.
“EU farmers egged on by the far-right”
The response from the top down has been to try to delegitimise the protests by branding the farmers as ‘far right’—or at best, as simple country folk who are being manipulated by right-wing political extremists.
Last weekend, UK Observer newspaper (Sunday sister of the liberal Guardian), the most pro-EU voice in the British media, worried aloud about how the European farmers’ cause “has been enthusiastically adopted by a resurgent populist far-right.”
Similar fears have repeatedly been expressed in the Brussels-backing news media this year: “Brussels struggles to placate farmers as far-right stokes protests,” and “EU farmers egged on by the far-right” (Financial Times); “How the far-right aims to ride farmers’ outrage to power in Europe” (Politico); “Far-right harvests farmers’ anger across Europe” (France 24) etc., etc.
The EU establishment and its media pals are so out of touch with the reality of people’s lives that they apparently imagine Europe’s naïve farmers are protesting only because they have been “egged on” or “stoked up” by ‘far-right’ agitators. The idea that these farmers might be entirely reasonable, hard-working people who are simply at the end of their collective tether with EU bureaucracy seems beyond the comprehension of those bureaucrats and their media mouthpieces.
But the ‘far-right’ slur is far more than a misunderstanding. As with all such Orwellian perversions of political language, it is designed to redefine what can and cannot be said. It is a deliberate attempt to suggest that the farmers have strayed beyond the fence that rings ‘respectable’ political debate, and onto dangerous extremist ground. The message is that their protests should not be dealt with as a ‘normal’ part of democratic politics.
“Blood and soil”
This becomes explicit when the elites wheel out political scientists to draw parallels with the darkest period of European history. One academic ‘expert on the far-right’ from the University of Gronginen worries that “farmers’ issues can lend themselves to far-right ideology through nostalgia for the past,” supposedly by raising themes that touch on “blood and soil.”
That slogan, ‘blood and soil,’ was of course a key theme of Nazi ideology during the 1930s, tied to toxic ideas of German racial purity and back-to-the-land romanticism. The ‘far-right’ political libel against Europe’s protesting farmers has now reached the point where their cause can even be indirectly compared to the rise of Hitler. If this carries on, perhaps it will only be a matter of time before some ‘expert’ reminds us that SS chief Heinrich Himmler was once a chicken farmer before running the Nazi death camps.
It is generally a sign that you are losing the argument when you start implying your opponents might be Nazis. The attempt to tar farmers with the ‘far-right’ brush is a sure sign that the EU technocratic elites fear that they are losing control of the political agenda—and risk losing their domination of the European Parliament to the upstarts of the populist right in June’s elections.
In reality of course Europe’s farmers, like the millions of other Europeans now considering voting for nationalist and populist parties, have nothing in common with Nazi ideologues. Farmers and rural communities are conservative, law-abiding people who have been driven to desperate protests by the impact of Net Zero targets and punitive Green policies which make them feel, in the words of one furious young Spanish farmer protesting with his tractor in Pamplona last week, that “They are drowning us with all these regulations.”
Less farming; less food
As the title of a recent report by the think-tank MCC Brussels puts it, Europe’s agricultural communities are facing nothing less than a “Silent War on Farming,” waged from Brussels.
For decades, EU agricultural policy was about the efficient, cheap, and safe production of food to feed the peoples of Europe and ensure that the continent never suffered famine again. Now, that policy has instead been captured by Green ideology, which demands that farmers use less land and less intensive methods to produce lower emissions. In sum, that must mean less farming—and less food being produced.
Farmers are bearing the brunt of the ideologically-driven regulations imposed by the EU, with falling incomes and the closure of family farms. The rest of Europe faces a scarcity-driven surge in prices—with shortages being met by food imports from countries with far higher emissions than the EU’s hi-tech farming sector.
For many Europeans now supporting the farmers, however, this is about even more than the price of food on their table. Farming and rural communities are at the heart of traditional European ideas of community and self-image. People who live far from the countryside can now identify with farmers who are resisting the same sort of threat to their way of life that they see posed by, for example, EU policies on mass migration.
In response to the spread of farmers’ protests and the wider groundswell of support, the EU elites have—alongside the ‘far-right’ scare campaign—sought to buy off farmers’ leaders with minor concessions and promises of ‘partnership’, as reported by The European Conservative.
Yet they cannot disguise for long their disdainful attitude towards the farmers and rural communities. So Politico’s “Brussels Playbook,” ever-loyal lapdog of the Brussels technocracy, complains that, “Judging by the amount of attention politicians grant farmers (who represent 2.9 percent of the EU’s working-age population), you’d be forgiven if you thought we lived in feudal times, where they represented 90 percent of Europe’s population.” In truth this sort of contemptuous attitude towards struggling Europeans only confirms the reality gap between the elitist minority who look down on the continent from within the Brussels ‘bubble,’ and the real world where at least 90% of modern Europe’s population lives and works.
Far from being some sort of feudal throw-back, the protesting farmers are in the front line of the battle for the future of European democracy. Which is why the rest of us should ignore the ‘far-right’ slurs and the attempts to pervert political language, and dig in to support Europe’s revolting farming communities whose fight—with high powered tractors, not pitchforks—has put the lords of the Brussels castle in fear of their political lives.