What a bewildering shift in recent times for Europe’s farmers. Long seen as national treasures, the EU establishment recently turned on them. Like Biden’s climate guru John Kerry, the Green ideologues in the European institutions now see farmers as embarrassing obstacles to saving the planet.

One of the defining features of the European integrationist project has been agricultural protectionism – long a major stone in the shoe of Australia-EU relations. Farmers, from the EU’s beginnings as the Common Market, were shielded from competition behind high tariff walls while receiving sky-high subsidies, which produced the famous butter mountains and wine lakes. When the UK joined the then-European Economic Community in 1973, our farm exports were suddenly and drastically restricted, as they had long been to the rest of the bloc.

In the years since, EU protectionism has remained strong, even if its Common Agricultural Policy subsidies for farmers shifted from payments for production to rewards for environmental activism. Greg Sheridan tells the story of the Australian who owned a holiday house in Italy and who for aesthetic reasons planted some olive trees. Neighbours told him that officials wanted to get in touch with him. He worried that they wanted money from him for some reason. But no: they wanted to tell him that he’d qualified for a payment for growing the olive trees.

In 2014 Tony Abbott launched an initiative for a free trade deal with the EU, our one major export market where such a deal wasn’t already achieved or in train. But after nine years of negotiations they finally stalled when it became apparent Brussels wasn’t prepared to offer significantly expanded access for our meat, sugar, dairy and other currently restricted farm exports. Moreover, the EU’s miserly offers were dependent on Australia promising no longer to produce 400 products with geographic names the member-states regard as exclusively their own. That would mean no more Australian feta, gorgonzola, prosecco, kalamata olives or kransky sausage. Most of our primary producers said no thanks.

Despite the EU’s continued fierce protectionism, its love-in with its farmers began evaporating in 2019 when Brussels jumped on the international net zero 2050 bandwagon. Its ‘European Green Deal’ prescribed the drastic reduction by 2030 of methane, nitrogen, pesticides and fertilisers.

As chronicled in these pages, the first insurrection against the war against farmers took place last year in the Netherlands. The ostensibly centrist government of Mark Rutte decreed that EU laws, insanely, would require the closure of 11,200 farms and compel another 17,600 to slash their livestock by a third. Unsurprisingly, the Netherlands swung sharply to the right. A farmers’ protest party, the Farmer-Citizens Movement, came out of nowhere to become the largest party in parliament’s upper house. Building on the insurgency, Geert Wilders’ right-wing Freedom Party went on to win more seats than any other party in last November’s Dutch elections. (In the curious ways of European politics, Rutte, having unleashed political chaos in his country, now looks set to be crowned the fourth Dutch Secretary-General of Nato. That’s despite him having failed during his fourteen years as prime minister to meet the Nato target of defence spending of 2 per cent GDP – a failure by many European countries fiercely criticised by Donald Trump. Absurdly, none of Nato’s Russian neighbours, most of which have understandably taken the spending commitment more seriously, have ever been offered the secretary-general role).

This year, inflamed by a rise in French and German duties on tractor diesel, the farmers’ revolt has spread throughout the EU. The European Commission has caved in to many farmers’ key demands and is set to scrap the controversial farm climate targets and to axe a ‘recommendation’ urging EU citizens to eat less meat. Brussels is also rowing back on planned rules requiring a proportion of farm land to be left fallow.

European Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen also offered farmers ‘strategic dialogues’ with EU officials, to which they responded by spraying their offices with manure. This reflects their suspicion that the Green ideologues in charge of farm policies – who haven’t reduced the overall emission reduction targets – have only conducted a tactical retreat. Farmers are also angry over declining incomes, suffocating red tape and surveillance by drones. They’re also hostile to cheap non-EU imports resulting from international trade deals and the waiving of quotas and duties on imports from Ukraine, which means its grain in particular under-cutting member-state prices. The farmers’ revolt has also been felt more generally in Europe. British beef and lamb producers feel angry that the government gave too much market access away in its recent free trade deals with Australia and New Zealand. And Labour-ruled Wales is seeing EU-style protests against Green tape, including a requirement that farmers will have to ‘rewild’ 20 per cent of their land to continue receiving subsidies – which would make many operations unviable.

The EU establishment has been eager to appease the protesting farmers as it fears the unrest will feed into a humiliating lurch to what it calls the ‘populist’ right at the European parliament elections in June. Its strategy is to bribe farmers with more subsidies and to put the brakes on further international trade deals.

The EU’s climb-down to its farmers represents its second major capitulation in the face of concerted net zero resistance in the past year. As reported in The Spectator Australia a year ago, what many assume is the unstoppable move to electric cars received a major setback: the EU’s Green lobby advocating the banning of sales of non-electric cars from 2035 was defeated by an insurgency led by the German car industry, which successfully lobbied for new internal combustion vehicles using synthetic e-fuels to be available indefinitely beyond then.

Long-leftish Portugal has become the latest country to lurch to the right and, in addition to the likely similar shift at the European parliamentary elections in June, there will probably be further shockwaves when, as is likely, Austria’s right-wing Freedom party wins elections expected in autumn. What is certain is that whereas the EU’s steady shift to the right was initially fueled principally by voter concerns over open borders and failed multiculturalism, it’s now also being strongly driven by the backlash against net-zero orthodoxies.