The farmer movements are leading the charge against the “degrowth” agenda of the far-left and neo-liberal elites which has used the green agenda as a pretence to impoverish the people of Europe, a French Member of the European Parliament said.
Speaking to Breitbart London ahead of the European Parliament elections this week, Patricia Chagnon, an MEP for the populist National Rally (RN) party in France, said that the people are “waking up” to the realities of the green agenda, with the farmer movements leading the charge against the Brussels technocrats pushing it down the throats of the rest of Europe.
The farmer protests in Europe, which emerged in The Netherlands in 2019 as tractors poured out onto highways and shut down infrastructure in opposition to the EU-led plan to shut down thousands of farms to meet dubious biodiversity and nitrogen emissions targets, have spread throughout the entire bloc, with major protests being seen in Belgium France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Poland and elsewhere over the past year, alone.
This week farmers once again took to their tractors, descending on Brussels and blockading border crossings between Spain and France, to remind the public of their struggles ahead of the EU elections with the promise to return to the streets after the autumn harvest if their demands are not met to scale back green regulations and globalist free trade deals making their profession unviable.
The farmers have already seen some success, forcing Brussels in March to suspend its “Nature Restoration” plan, which would have likely shut down thousands of farms. A pro-farmer party — the Farmer-Citizen Movement — is also set to enter government in the Netherlands and is projected to have secured seats in the European Parliament.
Chagnon, who attended a farmers’ tractor rally in Brussels on Tuesday, said: “This is a purposeful degrowth agenda, an ideological pair of pliers, on the one hand, you have the extreme-left which wants us to live with little candles and furry bits around our waist, eating insects.
“On the other side, you have the ultra-liberal, global elites who also want degrowth in Europe because they want to use Europeans as docile consumers, sourcing whatever they buy from the cheapest places in the world, they don’t care if the meat comes from Argentina or New Zealand or the milk from India, they couldn’t care less, they just want to make the biggest margins.”
However, the French MEP said that as she has been campaigning ahead of the bloc-wide elections this week, people are realising the malign influence of the green agenda, which she argued has only served to increase prices in Europe while enriching China as industries are offshored to the communist country, despite the EU only accounting for around 8 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions.
“The farmer movements had such success because the problems they have are the condensation of what everyone in the public is suffering with. The farmers are saying that their energy prices are too high, well everyone knows that we are all paying high electricity bills here in Europe.
“The farmers are saying our gasoline prices are too high and everyone sees that too when they go to the petrol station to fill up their cars. When the farmers say that they are being swamped with silly regulations, the hunters know that, the bus drivers know that, everybody knows that there are more and more regulations and little bits of paper you have to get stamped and approved,” Chagnon explained.
The MEP said that she felt one of the biggest advantages the farmer protests have had is that no one sees farmers as “lazy” people living off the state as could be said of other protest groups in society.
“Everyone knows that farmers work hard, so you can’t say that they are living off social benefits, there is not a single person in France who would say ‘the lazy bastards, the farmers’. So the general sympathy that goes out to them, be it in France, The Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, or Spain.”
She also argued that because the farmer demonstrations have been overwhelmingly peaceful, their message has been able to get through to the people without being demonised by the media. While the Yellow Vests were stopped by Macron and infiltrated by black bloc agitators, Chagnon said that the farmers have been “very careful” to avoid violence, so that the media would actually discuss their issues and not focus on sensationalism.
Critically, the populist politician said that the farmers showed the people of Europe that they share similar problems and that while each nation has specific national issues, there are also common EU problems that stem directly from the Brussels technocrats who have been running the EU for decades.
“They showed that there are common problems that unite European people, it suggests that if we are not alone, maybe we can do something about it because there are lots of us and together we might stand strong.”