January 26, 2024: Global News Roundup
Late to class—Farmer protests in Germany garner broad popular support, confuse media, stoke partisan anxiety
The Global News Roundup collects news stories from entirely international (non-US) media sources on variety of pressing global issues and events.
Good morning! More than five weeks after they began, farmer protests in Germany are still going strong, the most recent in a wave of farmer and worker protests in response to the energy crisis, rising costs of living, a sputtering manufacturing sector, large public and private debts, economic recession, and various government policies that are aggravating household insecurity. Small scale actions started the week before Christmas, and escalated to nationwide protests in early January, with farmers “causing traffic jams across the country as they blocked streets and highways with thousands of tractors and trucks”.
Euractiv explained in an article from last week that “the German government had to make cuts to plug a €17 billion gap in the budget after the Constitutional Court declared the proposed budget unconstitutional. To cut expenses, the government also decided to cut some subsidies for farmers”. By mid-January, “the government [had] already backpedalled on some of the announced measures like the cancellation of the motor vehicle tax exemption – which it withdrew – and the agricultural fuel subsidy – which it said it would now reduce gradually rather than immediately.”
Despite the concession, “this was not enough for farmers, so the German Farmers’ Association (DBV) stuck to its announced protests”. The diesel fuel subsidy continues to be a “sticking point” because “the government sees little room for maneuver regarding tax breaks on diesel fuel for farmers”. (Recall that European diesel fuel prices have been exceptionally volatile since the Ukraine war began, rising precipitously in mid-2022 and poised to rise again as conflict in the Middle East disrupts Red Sea transit routes). According to a report this week, the head of the German Farmers’ Association, Joachim Rukwied, stated that "Everything that has been announced until now has only caused more irritation rather than calm things down.”
The South China Morning Post interviewed some of the farmers:
It’s not just about the most recent cuts. That was simply the straw that broke the camel’s back,” said Hendrik Pferdmenges, 45, a crop farmer from Hanover.
“We have lost too many subsidies in recent years, and there is so much regulation and bureaucracy that at some point we will no longer be able to cope,” he said…
“If I had to describe in one word why I am here, then it would be ‘future’,” said Henrike Boerstling, 26, a crop farmer from Lower Saxony.
“I want my children to be able to become farmers one day. I want to be able to take over the farm from my father. I want to be able to run it properly and invest in my business,” she said.
A part-time farmer from Bernau described the situation as follows, “All spheres of society are so run down that money is needed everywhere, money which is then collected in the form of taxes. Countermeasures should have been taken years ago. Now we are supposed to pay for what those at the top have done. Nothing works any more in this state.”
Farmers in Germany were joined by other workers, some of whom protested alongside them, with others participating in different, parallel strikes. In general, the farmers seem to enjoy substantial popular support. According to WSWS, “ In the same week as the farmers’ protests, train drivers shut down the country’s rail network (Deutsche Bahn) for three days, with many craft workers joining the farmers’ demonstrations. Around 70 percent of the population have expressed support for the protesters, according to polls.” Further, “In a recent poll for the Bild daily, 64 per cent of Germans said they would like to see a change of government.”
Farmers from other nations are also joining with their German counterparts to protest “price pressures, taxes and green regulation - grievances that are shared by farmers across Europe.” An article published yesterday by Belgium-based Euronews notes that the rapid spread of protest movements, including large protests in France, are putting pressure on EU leadership: “Roads have been blocked across France, manure and agricultural waste dropped outside public offices, and bales of hay spread through fast food restaurants.”
The US state-run international news outlet Voice of America detailed similar protests in the Netherlands, Poland, and Romania. According to the article, published on Tuesday, the European Commission is beginning “strategic talks” with stakeholders this week in order to “assuage the ire on farms in several countries”: “The initiative was not confirmed until late last week, even though Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had promised in September to start discussions, insisting that farming and environmental protection were not mutually exclusive.”
(Image: “Banners reading 'Enough is enough' (L) and 'Agriculture thinks in generations, not in (legislative) periods' are fixed on tractors during a protest against the federal government's austerity plans in Halle an der Saale, eastern Germany. [Jens Schlueter/AFP]”, from Al Jazeera on 01/09/2024, here).
The image below is of an etching called “Charge” created by German artist Käthe Kollwitz in 1902, part of a series depicting imagined scenes from the 1524-5 Peasants’ War—the “biggest uprising in Western Europe before the French Revolution”—which played out in territories now part of modern-day Germany. The Käthe Kollwitz Museum’s write up on the series notes that, “In social democratic circles, the Peasants War of 1524/1525 was regarded as the quintessential starting point of a revolutionary tradition and the paradigm of the fight for freedom.” Occurring almost exactly 500 years ago, this is the earliest historical German farmer uprising I discovered in my research travels this week.
(Image: “Charge” by Käthe Kollwitz, 1902, etching, from the Peasants’ War series (1901-1908), drawn from the Käthe Kollwitz Museum website, here.)
Moving forward in time, the image below shows a farmer protest in Berlin in November 2019 in opposition to government regulations restricting pesticide and fertilizer use.
(Image: “An aerial view shows rows of tractors blocking the street as thousands of German farmers demonstrate along the 17 Juni street and Brandenburg Gate in Berlin”, from the Daily Mail, 11/26/2019, here).
Aside from the protests themselves, the most interesting part of my research was reading article after article from mainstream European presses in which various authors and outlets tied themselves in knots trying (and mostly failing) to fit the farmers’ concerns and perspectives into the same kinds of hyper-partisan categories that currently frame mainstream public debate in the US. As an American, it was fascinating to observe such a familiar political dynamic playing out in an international context.
Are the farmers “left” or “right” or “far right”? Are they “progressive” or “liberal” or “conservative” or “nationalist” or “populist”? Do they care about the environment or not? Do they support the government or not? Having grown accustomed to thinking about politics largely in terms of party platforms and single issues, the farmer uprising appeared to be forcing a much-needed mainstream conversation (reckoning?) about the economy—about occupations, income inequality, risk and insecurity, debt, economic policy, industry, agriculture, and social class.
Confronted with a mass uprising of people who, if they lived in the US, would be referred to as residents of “flyover country” by many urban, coastal elites, the European punditry seemed to be struggling with similar caricatures and blind spots. As the WSWS aptly noted earlier this month, “Representatives of the government and related media outlets alternately tried to portray the farmers’ protests as a far-right conspiracy or as protests by privileged layers greedy for subsidies.”
The most obvious examples, the ones that appeared most deeply steeped in partisan anxiety, simply labeled the protestors as “right-wing”, or at least close enough to safely assumed guilt by association. Deutche Welle, a state-run media outlet in Germany, noted with concern that the “protest is at risk of being infiltrated by extreme anti-government organizations” and that some protestors were “brandishing far-right symbols and clashing with police”.
Likewise, the BBC was concerned that “extremists”, namely the AfD party (Alternative for Germany), were “infiltrating the agricultural movement” and using the dispute between farmers and the government to advance a “Germany first” narrative. “Chancellor Olaf Scholz warned this weekend that extremists were using social media to "poison" democratic debate as he described any talk of uprisings as dangerous "nonsense"”, reported the BBC on January 14.
To be fair, there were some more nuanced discussions. For example, writing for the Guardian, Eva von Redecker appeared to be searching for the language of class inequality but couldn’t quite find it in the end. The result was a thoughtful but tortured analysis that mashed up economic status with political affiliation, roughly dividing farmers into two highly dubious groupings: rich Nazi farmers with shiny tractors who take all the subsidies, and eco-friendly smallholders uniquely deserving of state support. Ultimately endorsing a “progressive” approach to the farm issue, the author wrote:
In Germany, as in many other industrial nations, farmers have an exceptionally high suicide rate. Sometimes, as in cases of pesticide poisoning, it is not clear whether work accidents are actual accidents or covert “deaths of despair”, as sociologists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have called the epidemic of rural suicides in the US.
And farms die, too. Since the early 1990s, every second farm in Germany has closed down. Even now, many simply cannot be made profitable, no matter how hard or how constantly their owners or tenants work…
Nevertheless, it does seem rather out of step for the farmers to complain about cuts. They are subsidised in a unique way within our market economy. On average, farmers’ profits even rose last year. The EU subsidy system gives preference to big farms, as payments are linked to hectares. Those shiny, 10-tonne tractors blocking the roads are worth the equivalent of a family home…
A decent portion of the protesters genuinely distance themselves from neo-Nazi actors and the AfD…Appeasing those forces is a very bad idea. But fixing the dire situation of smaller, ecologically minded farms is imperative.
There was one line in Redecker’s write up that really stood out to me in which she laments the farmers’ apparent ignorance and hypocrisy in protesting the very government that subsidizes them: “It’s just that like many a neoliberal entrepreneur, they [the farmers] hate the state that protects them.”
In his prescient 2004 book on American politics, What’s the Matter with Kansas, Thomas Frank centered his analysis on those Democrats in the US who, paralleling Redecker, could not understand why working class Americans would ever vote “against their own interests” by supporting a Republican Party with such an openly anti-worker agenda:
Democrats no longer speak to the people on the losing end of a free-market system that is becoming more brutal and more arrogant by the day. … [B]y dropping the class language that once distinguished them sharply from Republicans they have left themselves vulnerable to cultural wedge issues like guns and abortion and the rest whose hallucinatory appeal would ordinarily be far overshadowed by material concerns.
Though he was speaking to the situation in Kansas, Frank helped me understand the confusion I saw in the European presses over the past month: “If basic economic issues are removed from the table… only the social issues remain to distinguish the parties.” But the protests suggest that the media and government leaders won’t be confused for much longer. Farmers and workers have put the economy back on the table.
Things I’m keeping an eye on:
1. Taiwan: Earlier this month, “Taiwanese voters swept the ruling Democratic Progressive Party's (DPP) presidential candidate Lai Ching-te into power on Saturday, strongly rejecting Chinese pressure to spurn him, as China said it would not give up on achieving "reunification”.” Mere days after the election, “Taiwan lost one of its few remaining diplomatic allies Nauru to China on Monday, just days after it elected a new president, and accused China of attempting to pressure it [Nauru, a small island nation]…”. Yesterday, a US warship made its first post-election pass through the Taiwan Strait, drawing a sharp response from Beijing. An article yesterday in the Chinese state-run China Daily taunted Taiwan: “As Taiwan braces for a third term of pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party authorities, so too will it face the political reality of a shrinking "diplomatic" recognition.”
2. International Criminal Court: Earlier this month, South Africa brought an accusation of genocide against Israel to the ICC for its consideration. “The case, filed by South Africa, sets a precedent as the first at the ICJ relating to the siege on the Gaza Strip, where more than 23,000 people have been killed since October 7, nearly 10,000 of them children,” reported Al Jazeera. The BBC explained that, “The ICJ could rule quickly on South Africa's request for Israel to suspend its military campaign”, but that “a final ruling on whether Israel is committing genocide could take several years.”
3. US withdrawal from Iraq? Al-Monitor reported on Wednesday that the Iraqi prime minister committed to seeking a timeline from the US for the withdrawal of US military forces from the country: “The Iraqi prime minister is thought to be facing increased domestic pressure to expel US troops from the country after the US military launched a series of airstrikes targeting Iran-backed militia personnel and facilities in Iraq in recent weeks.” The US has about 2,500 troops remaining in Iraq.
4. Red Sea trade routes and inflation: Not unlike what we saw as the Ukraine war escalated during spring and summer 2022, escalating conflict in the Middle East is disrupting global trade and supply chains. There have been increasingly frequent attacks on commercial vessels traversing the Red Sea, and also the Gulf of Aden, which connects the Red Sea to the Arabian Sea. (An estimated 12% of global trade passes through the Red Sea.) Maritime insurers are raising the cost of coverage for ships traversing the Red Sea, and traffic through the Suez Canal has “nosedived” as shipping companies reroute their cargoes: “Redirecting ships [e.g. around the Cape of Good Hope] is expected to cost up to $1m in extra fuel for every round trip between Asia and Europe.” Supply chain problems are erupting in oil and autos, among other critical global markets, and are already heavily impacting export-reliant economies like China’s. (China’s vulnerability to shipping risks partly underpins its rationale for constructing overland trade routes via the Belt and Road initiative.)
The map below from Reuters illustrates how cargoes are rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope in order to avoid passing through the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, adding 10 days to the journey from Singapore to Rotterdam in the Netherlands.
(Image: “Attacks by Yemen's Houthi militants on ships in the Red Sea are disrupting maritime trade through the Suez Canal, with some vessels re-routing to a much longer East-West route via the southern tip of Africa.”, from Reuters, here.)