Militant farmers vent fury in Brussels on eve of EU election

5 months ago 2

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BRUSSELS — A group of fringe militant farming groups staged a rally on the outskirts of Brussels Tuesday to mobilize voters ahead of this week’s European elections with a cautionary tale: vote for the far right or you’ll be eating insects for breakfast.

But barely 1,000 protesters showed up — a fraction of the 20,000 organizers had promised.

At the foot of the Atomium monument, built for the 1958 World Expo, confused tourists were met by hundreds of tractors carrying banners calling on European leaders to “stop killing farmers,” and warning that the EU’s climate neutrality plans mean the end of agriculture.

But, for all the talk of this being the culmination of a pan-European revolution to rid the continent of an out-of-touch political establishment, turnout was weak and the field in front of the stage only sparsely populated with groups brandishing flags from Flanders, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Poland.

Among the organizers were the notorious Dutch Farmers Defence Force, whose top members have compared the treatment of farmers to the Holocaust; Germany’s second-largest farmers’ union, LSV, whose spokesperson has been criticized for being too close to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD); and a quasi-think tank from Poland founded by a fur-farming magnate.

One by one, farmers were invited onto the stage, alongside a roster of far-right lawmakers and pundits.

“Farmers are merely the first victims of climate madness, after which they will come for us all,” said right-wing lawmaker Tom Vandendriessche of the Flemish nationalist Vlaams Belang party.

“We have had enough of this climate madness … enough of the political establishment telling us how to live and how to farm … The people are rising up. Election day will be the day of reckoning. We want our way of life back. We want our countries back.”

Vandendriessche has in the past likened the EU’s migration policy to a “deliberately organized repopulation” of the continent with foreigners.

Don’t go

More traditional and mainstream farm groups — which have staged a series of their own protests this year against the EU’s green agenda and the hardship many farmers are suffering — urged their members not to attend because of the event’s extremist overtones.

Green lawmakers called the gathering “a far-right event that is trying to disguise itself as a ‘farmers’ protest,’” and commended the mainstream farming groups for boycotting it.

“The far-right has been feeding farmers with the lie that Europe, and the Green Deal, are to blame for their hardship. A small segment of the farmers have adopted those lies and sides with the far right,” said Bas Eickhout, the Greens’ top candidate in the European elections.

“We are open to dialogue with the mainstream farmers’ unions. But definitely not with the far-right activists who will be in Brussels today.”

The MCC think tank, a Brussels-based hardline conservative organization with ties to Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, has in recent months convened a series of events that brought together the leaders of Tuesday’s protest.

MCC released a report to coincide with the demonstration, in which it argued that the EU’s approach to trade and agriculture was harming European farmers and threatening food security.

But another report on climate disinformation, also released Tuesday, warned that this year’s rural unrest around Europe had been weaponized to spread false claims seeking to discredit political action on climate change and deepen mistrust towards the EU.

The analysis, by a network of fact-checking organizations, found that politicians affiliated with the far right were responsible for the majority of social media posts against climate action and the EU in at least six European countries.

This story has been updated.

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