Meanwhile, farmers have also managed to coordinate demonstrations across the continent. In February, they blocked roads in Spain, Belgium, Greece, Poland, Moldova, and Bulgaria, shutting down border crossings along with Europe’s second-largest port, Antwerp. The same month, farmers from a number of nearby countries drove some 1,300 tractors into Brussels, the seat of the European Union, throwing eggs and stones at the European Parliament; setting fire to hay and piles of manure in front of the building; and, in a variation on a theme, spraying local police with liquid manure. What is all this?

Matthias Matthijs is the Dean Acheson associate professor of international political economy at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations. As Matthijs explains, the farmers are responding to a set of interconnected issues, all tracing back to the continent’s difficult-to-sustain agricultural economy—even as the protests themselves target new climate policies that would drive up farmers’ already high production costs.

The protests are succeeding, too, with governments repeatedly agreeing either to delay or to soften the climate regulations the farmers oppose. In the meantime, farmers remain immensely popular across Europe, including its cities. They’re also increasingly popular with, and attracted to, Europe’s growing populist right. After decades of mostly backing center-right Christian Democratic parties, European farmers are responding more and more to populist-right emphatic support for traditional values and unrelenting opposition to foreign goods. And as the populist right prepares to become the largest bloc in the European Parliament after EU elections in June, the farmers’ priorities are apt only to feature more prominently among the EU’s.

“The issue for farmers is the fairness of European climate policy. They make up about 4 percent of Europe’s population, and farming, about 1.5 percent of Europe’s GDP. Farmers know this and ask, Why are you targeting us with all these climate regulations? What about targeting industry? We’re willing to do our part, but what we’re being hit with is just disproportionate. They see the airline industry, manufacturing, and other industries as emitting far more greenhouse gases than they do, and they see those sectors as being spared—on account of the jobs these sectors provide and the lobbyists arrayed behind them.”

“There’s an enormous extent of sympathy for farmers. French public-opinion polls, for example, show support for them at more than 80 percent. Polish numbers are similar. This support cuts across classes, too. People in the working class often have an almost jingoistic sensibility about their countries’ farmers—seeing them as proud caretakers for their nations’ land. At the same time, there’s been an astonishing shift over recent years in the sensibility among many urban professionals, who used to want products from developing countries—certified as fair-trade—but now strongly prefer local produce, on account of the climate costs of transporting food over long distances. Many Europeans now want to eat local food and even prefer it to cheaper imports.”

“Farmers and populist-right politicians are both playing, meanwhile, on widespread sentiment against the idea that Europe should lead world in tough climate rules. The United States, for instance, is far behind Europe in reducing emissions; it’s been catching up under Joe Biden, though that progress might be reversed if Donald Trump wins the U.S. presidential election in November. But an important difference between the U.S. and the EU, either way, is that the U.S. is subsidizing products and industries to pursue climate goals, while the EU is still using rules. The U.S. uses tools, and the EU uses rules—a contrast you see farmers, politicians on the right, and other European opponents of tougher climate regulations emphasizing.”

Year of the Ballot

The contest is meanwhile just one of some 80 local and national elections scheduled for this year. Altogether, more than half the global population will able to vote in them. And both represent record numbers in human history.

In January, Steven Levitsky examined what the context of these elections show about the state of democracy worldwide. Most strikingly, to Levitsky: Despite the global rise of a populist right with autocratic tendencies, economic modernization has helped cultivate strong civil societies in recent decades—which have helped see to it, in turn, that very few democratic countries have become stable autocracies.

It might not always be apparent in the news, but for all the challenges it’s facing, democracy is proving remarkably resilient.

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