A ghost roams Europe and this time it is not the ghost of communism, announced by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848. Nor is it the first fascism that germinated from 1919 on the northern Italian plain to stop the ghost of communism by breaking the legs of peasant unionism. Nor is it the neoliberal specter invoked by Margaret Thatcher in 1979 with a deafening cry: “Society does not exist, only the individual exists!”. The ghost that now roams Europe rebels against the new religion of environmentalism and its urban prophets. Small and medium-sized agricultural properties defend their incomes and stand up against the accumulation of green regulations.
In Brussels, they are scared because the European elections in June are only four months away. In Paris, Emmanuel Macron has ordered the Government to stand by the protest, to intercept the National Front. Ségolène Royale, the Zapatera of 2007, the last muse of French socialism, has joined the initiative talking about Spanish tomatoes. In Germany, the federal government of social democrats, greens and liberals is in its lowest hours, besieged by tractors. The conservative CDU-CSU alliance seems to be better able to capitalize on the protest than the AfD (extreme right). Manfred Weber, leader of the European People’s Party, rubs his hands. Ursula von der Leyen wants to please everyone in order to be re-elected Commission President after June. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni is willing to grant whatever it takes to the Coldiretti (the main organization of Italian farmers) so that the League of Matteo Salvini does not take the vote of the tractors. However, Coldiretti is being overwhelmed by the bases. There have also been protests in Portugal and Greece. The wave of protest will arrive in Spain this week with Vox accents in the first manifestos. Vox fights to be the Voice of the Spanish Countryside. The Popular Party does not want this flag taken from it.
The wave arrives this week, but the foam has already been visible in the last few days in several provinces (León, Zamora, Salamanca…). Message chains via WhatsApp encouraged farmers to mobilize without waiting for traditional organizations. spontaneity Spontaneity with the Vox stamp. In this chain of messages, a manifesto signed by a National Association of Farmers and Ranchers of the Primary Sector has appeared, which proposed the first vindictive platform of the Agrarian February.
Lower the demands of the new CAP. Repeal of Agenda 20/30. Reduction of the bureaucratic burden. Further tax reduction on agricultural diesel. Repeal of laws that attack the rural environment (for example, the animal protection law). More rigor with imports. A law to limit the practices of climate geoengineering (techniques under study to intervene on a large scale in the climate to reverse the warming of the planet). The manifesto, attention, ends with two political points: to prohibit public financing of parties and to implement a new electoral law based on a majority model based on single-member districts of one hundred thousand inhabitants. An electoral law would leave all power to interior Spain.
Someone dreams of an agricultural 15-M. The transporter Manolín and its platform also move. An alternative coordinator is being forged. The People’s Party is hours away from summoning its Ministers of Agriculture tomorrow in Genoa. The PP has ceded to Vox the Ministries of Agriculture of Castile and Leon, the Valencian Community and Aragon, and the two parties share that of Extremadura. They may be regretting it now. For weeks now, the PP has been radicalizing the discourse to minimize Vox’s vote in the next Galician elections, a vote that could cause them displeasure. Vox wants to prove life after the post-July 23 depression. An agrarian 15-M in full debate on the Amnesty law. That would be the plan.
The Minister of Agriculture, the socialist Luis Planas, an experienced negotiator, an essential part of the Government of Pedro Sánchez, called the agricultural organizations this week before learning about his platform. I wanted to draw a frame before the explosion, if there is an explosion.
Epoch moment: the collision between agricultural property and environmental acceleration in the European Union. The issue is the depth of the protest four months before the European elections. The issue is who rides the agrarian horse better: the conventional right or the extreme right.
