A Dutch-led effort to take the plight of European farmers to the door of EU lawmakers saw over a thousand farmers and their tractors gather in the northern Brussels suburb of Laeken on Tuesday. A pan-European coalition of farmers hope to, once and for all, cripple Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s Green Deal.
Building on the momentum of previous protests, which have taken various European capitals by storm, farmers assembled in the shadow of Brussels’ iconic Atomium shortly before midday. Populist politicians and farming groups addressing the crowd spoke of their industry being strangled by a combination of EU technocracy, green overregulation, and cheap imports.
The day’s events were calm as delegations of Polish, Spanish, Italian, and even Romanian farmers mingled and discussed the coming months. In contrast to the media attempts to smear protesting farmers with accusations of right-wing extremism, the gathering showed concerned ordinary farmers just fighting for their livelihood against an overbearing authority.
“Von der Leyen wants to talk about you, not with you,” declared Dutch farmer Sieta van Keimpema on stage. She went on to decry EU double standards that incentivize imports from abroad, all the while strangling native European industry.
Other speakers linked the struggle of farmers to wider issues of mass immigration, demographic change, COVID lockdowns, and the influence of the World Economic Forum on EU Commission policy making. Speakers from former Soviet countries repeatedly drew on their personal experiences with communism when attacking the EU’s Green Deal.
The importance of agriculture in Europe’s social and cultural life was underlined by Vlaams Belang MEP Tom Vandendriessche, who described farmers as the “backbone of society.”
“With the world on the brink of a world war, farming is more important than ever,” proclaimed Dutch Farmers Defense Force leader Mark van den Oever. Van den Oever formed the group in May 2019 to fight the occupation of a pig farm by animal activists.
The day’s events finished shortly before 4 p.m., with a handful of tractors making their way to Brussels’ EU district for a symbolic blockade outside the Commission and EU Parliament buildings.
Poorly thought-out green policies, the flow of cheap agricultural products from a war-torn Ukraine, and the risk posed by free trade agreements with Latin America have all fueled a summer of anger among European farmers.
Today’s action was part of a wider effort by farmers to highlight agricultural issues less than a week before EU elections. A simultaneous joint effort by French and Spanish farmers closed the frontier between the two countries in protest against green policies and the risk of the Mercosur free trade agreement.