The European Union must stop giving ground on its climate vows—unless it wants to help the far right ride to victory.
As Europe hurtles towards its crucial June elections, the continent is grappling with a catastrophic rise of the far right—which looks set to ride to power on the backs of raging farmers. Right-wingers have latched climate-crisis-denying movements on to the riotous farmers’ actions, seeking to win over a voter base running to nearly 10 million.
The farmers are protesting against excessive costs and environmental policies they say are trapping them in the straitjackets of ‘bureaucracy’ and falling profits. Their objections are fertile ground for right-wingers to plant more seeds of power, as they rehearse their old rhetoric that state intervention is an abomination and that the ‘establishment’ does not represent the ‘common man’.
Gathering pace
The tie-in with the farmers is definitely helping the far right: votes, polls and trends show its jackbooted march into the political mainstream is gathering pace and solidifying in the corridors of power. A recent survey by the European Council on Foreign Relations reveals right-wing parties are leading in nine EU countries, climbing up the polls and threatening to expand their seats in the European Parliament.
Giorgia Meloni—whose Fratelli d’Italia has neofascist roots—is prime minister of Italy and Spain’s far-right Vox has the backing of millions of voters. In Greece, the Spartans are on the rise, despite their links to the Nazi Golden Dawn party. The far right is also part of the current coalition in Finland and props up another in Sweden, while in Austria the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs—which has had close links to Vladimir Putin’s United Russia—is ahead in the polls. In Germany, the neoNazi-linked Alternative für Deutschland is so extreme it is facing calls for it to be outlawed—although this has encouraged its core supporters to be still more truculent.
At the heart of them all is the ability cynically to co-opt discontent for their own means—and the farmers’ rage can be made to measure. Backing farmers’ rights was once the preserve of the left, supported by trade unions. Now that the far right has become so embedded, the toxic tie-in has even given rise to a ‘Farmers’ Defence Force’ in the Netherlands, backing the uprisings which have recently gripped Europe.
Disturbing parallels
The farmers’ fury culminated this month in chaotic tractor blockades clogging roads and vicious clashes with riot police, with hundreds of farm vehicles choking Brussels city centre and the European Parliament being pelted with eggs. The protests which brought havoc to the heart of EU democracy had disturbing parallels with the January 2021 storming of the Capitol in Washington DC by supporters of the former US president, Donald Trump, riled by his misinformation that the election he had lost to Joe Biden had been rigged. And right-wing populists around the world have offered their support for the farmers’ stand—from Trump to France’s Marine Le Pen.
Meanwhile, conspiratorial Telegram groups claim farms are being shut to make space for asylum-seekers—a nightmarish illustration of how the right is using its unholy alliance with the farmers to push on its other traditional hot button of ‘immigration’. But most devastatingly, right-wingers are also using the bond to promote their attacks on the climate rules they hate. Part of the farmers’ rage is their feeling they are caught between apparently conflicting public demands for cheap food and EU-imposed climate-friendly processes.
Instead of facing down the protesters—and their far-right backers—the EU’s leaders have wilted, reversing decades of hard-won climate policy. As the farmers’ protests raged, the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, caved by saying ‘administrative burdens’ on farming would be eased. Already, there has been a loosening of environmental regulations on fallow land, while France has paused a national policy on reduction of pesticide use.
The overall European Green Deal vision for tackling climate change remains intact—supported by more than 24 laws passed over the last five years. But giving into the farmers on climate is now effectively giving ground to the far right—and giving it a springboard to attack wider climate policy.
In Brussels, the European People’s Party is launching an assault on the Green Deal. Protests against rules to curb nitrogen emission in the Netherlands and the exploitation of farmers’ demonstrations by the AfD in Germany show the extent to which the far right is determined to dismantle environmental policies—which are designed to save the planet, not constrain farmers.
Falling incomes
This is not to say that the EU must not do more to address the farmers’ ‘life or death’ concerns. Farmers are plagued by falling incomes, high costs and competition from cheap imports—and many feel the EU’s recent announcement of tighter green regulations threatens to make their lives, and decreasing profit margins, disastrously worse.
Their overheads, especially for energy, transport and fertiliser, have soared since Russia started its bloody bombardment of Ukraine in February 2022. This has been exacerbated by the consumer-appeasing blow of governments and retailers reducing food prices to dampen the spiralling impact of the cost-of-living crisis.
The figures backing up the farmers’ objections are stark: ‘farm-gate’ prices—the base price farmers receive for their produce—plummeted by nearly 9 per cent on average between the third quarter of 2022 and the same period last year. Nor are those struggling the most the best cushioned by the €55 billion-a-year subsidies under the Common Agricultural Policy: the largest payments go to the biggest farms.
But solutions cannot come at the expense of the environment.
Critical juncture
Europe’s commitment to climate action is at a critical juncture. The domino effect of any more concessions on climate would not only weaken the left against the rise of the right but represent a loss in the battle against climate change. The urgency of the situation cannot be overstated: the EU’s climate service has announced that global heating from preindustrial times for the first time exceeded 1.5C in the year to January, in a significant breach of the Paris Agreement’s preferred ceiling.
This may not break the landmark agreement but it does send the world careening closer to that over the longer run. It is imperative that the EU steers away from further concessions and reaffirms its commitment to a sustainable, green future.
Last year’s ground-breaking COP28 climate summit in the United Arab Emirates concluded with a historic agreement to phase out fossil fuels, triple renewable energy and operationalise the long-overdue ‘loss and damage’ fund. The conference president, Sultan Al Jaber, declared the ‘fundamental challenges of the energy transition’ were to balance the growth of economies and energy security with ‘putting the brakes on emissions’. Yet his climate-adaptation blueprint, which saw nearly 200 countries commit to make the transition from fossil fuels under the ‘UAE consensus’, will be useless if the EU continues to make a U-turn on vital climate policy.
Ultimately, protecting European democracy requires a resolute stand against the far right and its alliance with aggravated farmers. Only by prioritising climate action can Europe hope to safeguard its values and protect itself from the insidious influence of far-right ideologies, which thrive on misinformation, hatred and a blatant disregard for the environmental challenges that endanger us all.
Isabel Schatzschneider is an environmental activist and commentator on EU environment policy. She is a research associate at the Friedrich-Alexander University, Erlangen-Nüremberg. Previously she was a researcher at the Schweisfurth Foundation in Munich.