Farmers and their tractors gathered last Monday in Berlin as well as in other cities across Germany, including Hamburg, Cologne and Bremen. The protest movement will culminate in a massive gathering planned for Monday, January 15.
The aim of the protests? To persuade Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition government to back down from its decision to abolish tax breaks for diesel fuel in agriculture – a sector that is already struggling with high energy costs. Because the German government has de facto “screwed itself and its own citizens in favor of Ukraine” by cutting off the supply of cheap energy from Russia because Brussels ordered it to do so. Only to then decide that it’s a good thing to abolish the tax breaks because diesel isn’t “green” enough anyway. Who could have foreseen that the German economy could not be kept going by wind and solar power alone? Apparently not this traffic light government.
Team Scholz is now feeling the hot headwind and has already announced that the cuts in subsidies will now only be made gradually. Apparently no one in this government has ever tried to pull a band-aid off the skin very slowly. The farmers also reacted gradually – straight off the highway and towards the Brandenburg Gate.
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Another point of contention is the exemption from road tax for agricultural vehicles, which the Ampel plans to reintroduce. Well, at least the farmers got their money’s worth this week by taking their tractors for a spin on roads they probably would normally have left alone, just to join the protests. This whole mess is the result of a self-inflicted mistake by Team Scholz.
What else is new? It’s pretty standard procedure for the Western establishment: First they screw everything up, and then the cost of their mess is passed on to the citizens. Scholz quietly diverted 60 billion euros from a money fund intended for the post-COVID economic recovery and put it into a money fund for the much-vaunted “German industry”. But these funds only go to “green” industrial companies. Everyone else should see for themselves. This is the same arrogant attitude that some representatives of the establishment display when it comes to subsidies for agricultural diesel. In any case, Scholz has been ordered by the courts to return the embezzled money from the COVID fund to it – so that the state does not run the risk of getting into debt. But oops, it was already too late. Berlin was missing 17 billion euros when the money was booked back. So the government had to figure out who it could screw over next to get some quick cash. And apparently those who literally feed the German people were identified as useful cash cows.
The government now hears and sees the honking tractors and the big trucks when it now looks out of the window in the Bundestag, which is just a stone’s throw away from the epicenter of the protests at the Brandenburg Gate. Instead, Scholz has once again argued that European nations should follow Germany’s lead and provide more money for Ukraine – as if nothing else was going on in his own country. You’d think that if he doesn’t keep stuffing Ukraine with cash and weapons, Russian tanks will roll right through to Berlin. Scholz should really be more worried about the German tractors and trucks that are already rolling through almost directly under his office window. Germany doubled its military aid to Ukraine to eight billion euros just before the New Year. Compare that to the 900 million euros expected to be raised by the abolition of tax breaks for diesel.
If Team Scholz was so cavalier about throwing money at the creation of this whole debt problem, you’d think it would at least be easy enough to keep the money for Ukraine and take the noose off the farmers’ necks. It looks like the German farmers will have to move to Ukraine to be treated fairly by their own government.
Team Scholz is making one of the most productive elements of German society pay a high price for its own relentless mistakes. The exact additional cost after the abolition of tax relief is up to 10,000 euros a year for some farmers, a potentially catastrophic loss for them. But the message being spread by government officials is that farmers are already sufficiently subsidized. One might think that this involves dumping wheelbarrows of cash in front of farms. However, the reality is clearly different if an extra 10,000 euros a year is a threatening scenario.
Instead of acknowledging the damage done, the Home Office is using a tried and tested tactic: it is trying to relativize the plight of farmers and link their concerns and worries to “right-wing extremists” who are allegedly already trying to use the protests for their own ends. Anyone who disagrees with the agenda of the Western establishment can apparently be labeled as “far-right” these days. Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck accused some participants in the farmers’ protests of “fantasies of overthrow”. This is the same guy who dreamed that shortening individual shower times would increase the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin. It’s like the accusation of racism – a clearly cynical attempt to shut down debate and stigmatize entire movements. However, the average German does not seem to want to put up with this any longer. According to a new survey, 70 percent of them said that Scholz should resign before the next election in October 2025.
The establishment is constantly lecturing on the need for unity. Apparently, however, these state officials can’t even recognize unity when it has literally rolled up to the Brandenburg Gate. Truck drivers have already joined the farmers’ cause. According to a new poll conducted by INSA on behalf of the Bild newspaper, there are almost as many Germans who support the farmers’ cause – 68 percent – as those who want Scholz to resign. That’s real unity!
Right, left, center and people from all walks of life are uniting behind the only group in society that has a proven ability to make the government sweat. And this government’s response is to try to promote even more division in society. It identifies the various factions among those who are unhappy with the state of affairs and tries to play them off against each other. This is intended to divide them instead of focusing on the real problem: namely the government itself. One German government official even suggested that the small farmers should blame the big farmers for their predicament. As if the kind of harsh government measures that have led to this mess were not also entirely responsible for the phenomenon of giant agribusinesses.
Polls suggest that these farmer protests have come to epitomize German unity. If there’s one thing most Germans seem to agree on, it’s how fucked up the people in charge really are. Of course, Team Scholz can continue to bury its head in the sand and pretend the country is broke while it shovels money into Ukraine. But in that case, he and his accomplices must brace themselves for the inevitable electoral reckoning when voters choose an alternative to the establishment responsible for the mess.
LINK: Von Rachel Marsden
