{"id":17517,"date":"2024-02-22T21:15:55","date_gmt":"2024-02-22T19:15:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/?p=17517"},"modified":"2024-02-22T21:15:55","modified_gmt":"2024-02-22T19:15:55","slug":"farmers-revolt-and-eu-climate-policies-collapse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/?p=17517","title":{"rendered":"Farmers revolt and EU climate policies collapse"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Ursula von der Leyen surrendered to the angry peasants faster than one can swing a\u2026 pitchfork or throw a tractor full of manure outside the European Parliament.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The president of the European Commission, who is preparing to run for a second term as head of the EU’s executive body, told lawmakers that the Commission is withdrawing a bill to halve the use of chemical pesticides by 2030 and that, instead , will make further consultations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The proposed measure was a key pillar of the Commission’s European Green Deal and its “Farm to Fork” strategy, which aims to make the EU carbon neutral by 2050, make agriculture more climate-friendly environment and to preserve biodiversity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fear of the extreme right ahead of the European elections<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Von der Leyen’s sudden U-turn on one of her signature policies was not just an attempt to defuse the peasant revolt spreading across Europe over rising fuel costs, burdensome environmental regulations, price squeeze by retailers and cheap imports. It was also a sign of growing panic among the EU’s mainstream parties over the seemingly inexorable rise of far-right nationalists ahead of June’s EU elections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Von der Leyen, a former German defense minister, is herself in the running to lead the centre-right European People’s Party’s election campaign, despite not running for a single seat in the European Parliament. Her crowning at the party congress on March 6-7 as the EPP’s lead candidate for the Commission administration from 2024 to 2029 is formal, moreover, as there is no other candidate.<\/p>\n\n\n

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But she has been forced to scale back her green policies to placate a party so spooked by the “green frenzy” against net zero legislation that it is rushing to reposition itself as the voice of incremental adjustment at a pace that the citizens can accept and afford.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is it too late already?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Incidentally, an unpublished poll conducted for the European Parliament in January showed that Eurosceptic, sovereign or populist parties have taken the lead in eight of the 27 EU member states and are second in four others. In addition, the countries where the far right polls the strongest include those with the most seats in the legislature \u2013 Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Romania and the Netherlands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is starting to get scary and events like the peasant uprising are playing into the hands of populists such as France’s Marine Le Pen, Germany’s Alice Weidel and Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders, who are “rising” from grassroots anti-metropolitan grumbling elite<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“The proposal (of pesticides) has become a symbol of polarization,” von der Leyen admitted in parliament in Strasbourg. “To move forward, we need more dialogue and a different approach.” He may have knocked on the stable door, but the horse is probably already\u2026gone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Peasants traditionally voted for the conservative and Christian Democratic parties, while the Socialists and Social Democrats had their strongholds in the industrial urban areas. We can recall, for example, the former French president Jacques Chirac, a friend of Gaulish farmers, happily slapping the rears of cows in his south-western constituency of Corr\u00e8ze or at the annual Paris agricultural fair. Today, these voters are more likely to vote for Le Pen’s National Alert, according to recent polls.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Center-right parties in Europe are losing farmers<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In France, the center-right Republicans, Chirac’s heirs, have just 8%, while National Alarm exceeds 30% in the latest polls and the even more right-wing “Reconquest!” of the anti-Islamist ideologue \u00c9ric Zemmour gathers another 6-8%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the Netherlands, farmers’ discontent over restrictions on nitrogen emissions led to the sudden rise of the Farmer-Citizens Movement, a party that came out of nowhere and won the most votes in last March’s regional elections. Many of those protest voters have since defected to Wilders’ Freedom party, which led in November’s general election polls and has since gained more ground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Appeasing the peasant revolt may stop farmers from blocking highways or burning straw bales outside government offices, but it is unlikely to drive them back to the mainstream centre-right, given the depth of their discontent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ironically, the party that seems to suffer the most from farmers’ anger is the Greens, who are not even part of the coalition of mainstream centre-right, centre-liberal and centre-left parties that dominate the Commission and Parliament. Recent polls show the Greens are set to lose up to a third of their 72 seats in the 720-member legislature to the “green shock”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One scant consolation for von der Leyen is that right-wing populists cannot agree to sit in a single group in the European Parliament because of personal, ideological or national rivalries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ursula von der Leyen surrendered to the angry peasants faster than one can swing a\u2026 pitchfork or throw a tractor full of manure outside…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[818,390],"tags":[5236,25,2441,113],"class_list":["post-17517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-politics","tag-climate-policies","tag-eu","tag-far-right","tag-farmers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17517"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17517\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17521,"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17517\/revisions\/17521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}