In Brussels, we are watching with concern these resistance or protest movements which are agitating the European agricultural world. The precedent of the “yellow vests” in France has traumatized many of Emmanuel Macron’s twenty-six counterparts, and community institutions fear that a movement of this type will start from the countryside and spread across the continent.
Whether in the Council, the Commission or the European Parliament, recent months have seen the various actors of the European Union (EU) pay very specific attention to an agricultural sector which has largely borne the brunt of the renewed inflation , in the wake of the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis, and which the opening of the internal market to Ukrainian products has further weakened.
The approach of the European elections, scheduled for June 6 to 9, and the fear of seeing, as polls predict, populist and nationalist parties gaining ground in the Strasbourg Parliament, has led to a hardening of positions, whether in the conservative ranks of the Hemicycle or in the most agricultural member states. In this context, the European Green Deal, which should lead the Twenty-Seven to carbon neutrality in 2050, is not coming out unscathed.
Failure of “the depolarization strategy”
Everywhere in Europe, far-right parties are now speaking out for an agriculture that the Green Deal would endanger. Starting with the National Rally in France, whose head of list in the European elections, Jordan Bardella, called, Wednesday January 17, in Strasbourg, to declare “state of agricultural emergency”.
Since the Commission presented, in July 2021, more than 70 legislative proposals which should allow them to reduce their CO emissions by 55%2 in 2030 compared to 1990, Europeans have undertaken a veritable legislative marathon – end of the thermal engine in 2035, reform of the carbon market, implementation of a carbon tax at borders, adoption of ambitious objectives in terms of renewable energies … – to put ourselves in a position to respect the Paris climate agreement.
But, in the summer of 2023, at the very moment when the strong man of the Green Deal, Commissioner Frans Timmermans, was leaving office to get involved in Dutch political life, the mechanics began to seize up, and the texts which still to be completed – more linked to the environment than to global warming – have paid the price. “The depolarization strategy that worked for the rest of the Green Deal is failing on agriculture”explained Pascal Canfin, the president of the environment committee of the European Parliament, several times.
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