BRUSSELS (AP) — A surge in agricultural protests from the streets of Berlin to the flanks of the Pyrenees reached the European Union’s headquarters on Wednesday where farmers decried everything from petty bureaucratic meddling to the scourge of bankruptcy and worse.
With the political visibility of farming and food going to the heart and origins of the EU, the volatile sector could turn into a burning issue before the June 6-9 European Parliament election, pitting traditional political groups on the defensive against populist and far-right parties sensing an opportunity.
“My words for today are: we are fed up,” said Benoit Laqueue, who had traveled from his farm in northern France to angrily point at the buildings of the European Parliament, which helps set up EU farm rules and payments that have farmers up in arms.
“The problem are the technocrats,” he said. “We have the farmers’ common sense.”
It’s a refrain heard across the 27-nation bloc, as farmers have to adapt to anything from climate change and environmental pollution rules to free trade agreements with global farming companies that they feel are negotiated over their heads.
Beyond Brussels and France on Wednesday, there were also demonstrations in Poland, where disgruntled farmers slow-drove their tractors through major cities in protest at what they call “unfair” competition from neighboring Ukraine, which has been granted special wartime export regulations.
In a sign that the protest movement was expanding in France, roadblocks were spreading in many regions, coming a day after a farmer and her daughter died when a car crashed into a protest barricade in the southwest. The protests are the first major challenge for newly appointed Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, who took office two weeks ago.
Attal met with farmers’ unions representatives earlier this week, and spokesperson Prisca Thevenot said Wednesday that the government would respond to the crisis “in the coming days.” Announcements were expected to focus on lower fuel prices for farmers and simpler regulations.
With the European election only months away, the crisis is latched onto by political opponents, especially the hard right, in several EU nations.
“So the question, and this is also why I’m here today, is what do we do on June 9th? Do we change the political majority with other European countries,” said Marion Marechal, the lead candidate of the French far-right Reconquest party.
She had traveled to Brussels to mix with the farmers with a core message of “do we carry on as before? So we can expect a drop in European agricultural production and a further explosion in imports?”
The French farmers in Brussels also had a meeting with the MCC Hungarian cultural institution. It is heavily backed by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has pushed the boundaries of the EU’s rule of law principles for years and has been relentless in exploiting any issue that can be turned against the bloc.
A seedling of the EU was farming, and the quest of nations to make sure that hunger would never return in the wake of World War II. Production measures and regulations were centralized across the member nations, and even if some farming companies became wealthy multinationals because of it, smaller farmers have increasingly felt left out.
Smaller family farmers are behind many of the protests across the bloc. They complain that applying nitpicking EU regulations not only force them to spend hours on their laptops instead of their tractors, but also require major investments that starts bleeding red on their books.
The EU and governments insist that a warming climate and agricultural pollution forces them to push through drastic measures.
Those measures are now raising anger.
On Tuesday, a car carrying three people rammed into a barricade of straw bales in the town of Pamiers, in the Ariege region on the Pyrenees. A 36-year-old female farmer was killed. Her 12-year-old daughter died later in a hospital, the local prosecutor said in a statement.
On Wednesday, protesters targeted the columned prefecture building in southwestern Agen, where the farmer protests originated. They heaped tires, hay and manure outside its gates and later set the mix ablaze. A farm vehicle scooped it up and tossed it over the gate into the courtyard.
Farmers’ protests have been staged in recent weeks in Germany, the Netherlands and Romania too. In Poland, reacting to the farmers’ protest, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Wednesday that talks would be held with Ukraine’s government to ensure that agriculture production and the market weren’t threatened by the “uncontrolled inflow of farm produce from Ukraine.”
Fresh from a visit to Kyiv, Tusk said that the Ukrainian authorities “are not interested in the uncontrolled export” of their produce, but want it to be regulated.
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Monika Scislowska in Warsaw, Poland, and Mark D. Carlson in Brussels, contributed to this story.