ANDEREN, Netherlands –
Inside the barn in the flat fields of northern Netherlands, Jos Ubels cradles a newborn Blonde d’Aquitaine calf, the latest addition to his herd of more than 300 dairy cattle.
Little could be more idyllic.
Few, Ubels says, could be more threatened.
As Europe seeks to address the threat of climate change, it is imposing more rules on farmers like Ubels. He dedicates one day a week to bureaucracy, responding to demands from European Union and national officials seeking to decide when farmers can plant and harvest, and how much fertilizer or manure they can use.
Meanwhile, competition from cheap imports is undercutting the prices of their products, without having to meet the same standards. The main political parties failed to act on farmers’ complaints for decades, Ubels says. Now the radical right is intervening.
Across much of the EU’s 27 countries, from Finland to Greece, Poland to Ireland, farmer discontent is gaining momentum as June’s EU parliamentary elections approach.
Ubels is second in command of the Farmers Defense Forces, one of the most prominent groups that emerged from the promotion. The FDF, whose symbol is a double crossed gallows, was formed in 2019 and has since expanded into Belgium. He has links to similar groups elsewhere in the EU and is a driving force behind a planned June 4 demonstration in Brussels that he hopes will draw 100,000 people to the EU capital and help shape the outcome of the election. .
“It’s time for us to fight back,” Ubels said. “We are done with listening silently and doing what we are told.”
Have you lost confidence in democracy? “No. … I have lost faith in politics. And that is one step away.”
The FDF itself puts it more ominously on its website: “Our confidence in the rule of law is wavering!”
This story, supported by the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, is part of an ongoing Associated Press series covering threats to democracy in Europe.
‘Do not give up!’
In March, protesting Belgian farmers went crazy at a demonstration outside the EU headquarters in Brussels, setting fire to the entrance to a metro station and attacking police with eggs and liquid manure. In France, protesters attempted to storm a government building.
In a video from another protest, in front of burning tires and pallets, FDF leader Mark van den Oever said two politicians upset his stomach, saying they would “soon be in the spotlight.” The FDF denies that this was a threat of physical violence.
Across the EU over the winter, convoys of tractors blocked ports and main roads, sometimes for days, in some of the most serious agricultural protests in half a century.
Farmers and the EU have had a sometimes contentious relationship. What is new is the shift towards the extreme right.
Destitute after World War II and with hunger still a scourge in winter, Europe desperately needed food security. The EU intervened, ensuring abundant food for the population, turning the sector into an export powerhouse and currently financing farmers to the tune of more than €50 billion a year.
However, despite the strategic importance of agriculture, the EU recognizes that farmers earn approximately 40% less than non-agricultural workers, while 80% of support goes to a privileged 20% of farmers. Many of the bloc’s 8.7 million farmworkers are near or below the poverty line.
At the same time, the EU is trying to push for strict environmental and agricultural laws as part of its Green Deal to make the bloc climate neutral by 2050. Agriculture accounts for more than 10% of the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions, coming from sources such as nitrous oxide from fertilizers, carbon dioxide from vehicles and methane from livestock.
Reducing these emissions has forced farmers to make sudden changes at a time of financial insecurity. The COVID-19 pandemic and rising inflation have raised the cost of goods and labor, while farmers’ incomes have declined as pressured consumers cut back.
And then there is the war next door. After Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, the EU granted tariff-free access to agricultural imports from Ukraine, many of them exempt from the strict environmental standards the bloc imposes on its own producers. Imports increased from €7 billion in 2021 to €13 billion the following year, causing surpluses and undercutting farmers, particularly in Poland.
“Don’t give in,” Marion Maréchal, the main candidate of the French far-right Reconquista. party in the June elections, she exhorted farmers at a protest earlier this year. “You have to be in the streets. You have to make yourself heard. You have to…” she tried to finish the sentence but she was drowned out by shouts of “Don’t give up!” Do not give up!
Fertile soil
Agriculture in Europe is more than just food; touches identity. In France, the far right exploits the love of “terroir,” that mythical combination of soil, location, culture and climate.
“The French realize that farmers are the roots of our society,” Maréchal said.
These sentiments resonate throughout Europe. In Ireland, where more than a million people died in the 1845-1852 famine, agriculture “is deeply ingrained in our culture, in our psyche,” said Environment Minister Eamon Ryan, a Green Party lawmaker.
The far right has used agriculture as a way to attack traditional parties. In Italy, the far right has mocked EU efforts to promote a low-carbon diet, playing on farmers’ fears that lab-grown proteins and insects could one day replace meat.
“Rebellion is the language of those who are not heard. Now, back off,” far-right Italian lawmaker Nicola Procaccini warned in February. In a few months, he said, the European elections “will put people back in the place of ideologies.”
These calls fall on fertile ground. According to predictions from the European Council on Foreign Relations, the radical right group Identity and Democracy could become the third largest group in the next European Parliament, behind the Christian Democrats and the Socialists, but overtaking the Liberals and the Greens. Farm protests are providing vital influence.
A shovel is a shovel
One farmer avoiding militant demonstrations is Bart Dochy in western Belgium. As a Christian Democrat mayor of the agricultural town of Ledegem and a regional parliamentarian in Flanders, he represents the traditional forces of European agricultural communities: Christianity and conservatism. When socialism took over the big cities, the countryside and its farmers remained staunchly Christian Democrats.
That has now changed. Once, billboards with the cry: “Save our farmers!” it would have come from his party; They now carry the logo of the far-right Flemish Interest party, which polls show will become Belgium’s largest party in June.
“In a certain sense, it is logical that extreme parties have specialized in capturing this discontent. They call things by their name. And that is good,” he stated. But farming is complicated, he warned: nature, trade, budgets, commodity prices and geopolitics are all involved. The solutions will have to come from common sense, “not from extremes.”
Dochy’s Christian Democrats are part of the largest group in the EU parliament, the European People’s Party, which was once a strong supporter of the EU Green Deal. After all, farmers are among the biggest losers from climate change, affected at different times by floods, wildfires, droughts and extreme temperatures.
But since the protests began, EU policy on agriculture and climate has shifted to the right, angering many of the former centre-right allies with whom it established the Green Deal. Measures to reduce pesticide use and protect biodiversity have been weakened, while protesters’ demands to reduce regulation have been heard.
But as the rhetoric heats up, so does the climate. Data from early 2024 shows record temperatures in Europe. In Greece, where an estimated 1,750 square kilometers (675 square miles) will burn in 2023, the worst fire on record in the EU, wildfires are already breaking out, weeks earlier than expected.
The far right does not offer detailed solutions to the climate crisis, but it has proven adept at exploiting farmers’ frustrations. In its program for the June elections, the Dutch far-right party, the PVV, is short on details but has plenty of slogans about “climate hysteria” and its “tsunami of rules.” Nature and climate laws, he said, “should not lead entire sectors to be forced into bankruptcy.”
Ubels defended the realpolitik of farmers.
“The government doesn’t listen to us, but the opposition does,” he said.