NO FARMS, NO FOOD.

The farmers' protests in Germany, which might be understood as the usual sort of pique subsidy recipients show when their subsidies are reduced, has purchase.

Thousands of demonstrators descended on the German capital Monday as a week-long protest over subsidy cuts in the agriculture sector reached a climax at the city’s famed Brandenburg Gate. Behind the crowd, tractors, which last week blocked highways across the country, lined the avenue cutting through Berlin’s Tiergarten park.

Following protests in December, the government reversed a decision on axing a tax discount for agricultural vehicles, and announced that a diesel subsidy would be phased out over three years rather than being cut immediately. But the German Farmers’ Association said the concessions didn’t go far enough.

“Without stability in the countryside, without agriculture, our country has no future,” German Farmers’ Association President Joachim Rukwied said from the stage. “That’s why we are prepared to take to the streets.”

The deprivation that green policies bring is a central theme in Germany and everywhere else they're tried.  The protests, though, call attention to failures of the Professional Managerial Class, whether in these United States or elsewhere in the developed world.

Monday’s demonstration was also an outlet for general dissatisfaction with the government, adding to the mounting pressure on Chancellor Olaf Scholz after scrambling to fix a billion-euro budget blunder, which led to the subsidy cuts.

Germany’s constitutional court ruled in November that the government’s decision to reallocate $65.21 billion of unused emergency funds from the coronavirus pandemic for its climate and transformation fund (CTF) was unconstitutional, forcing the government to revise spending plans and tighten the purse strings.

Misappropriation of corona moneys for other boondoggles, how very Bidenesque of the German government.  Perhaps when the constitutional court there rules, afterwards matters are in Ordnung.

The coalition government, though?  It's the same omnium-gatherum of wishful thinkers that argue with, but mostly vote for, the Donks in the States.

Eric Krems, 36, traveled four hours on Monday with other farmers from the Oberlausitz region, southeast of the capital.

“Originally, we had hoped that the cuts to the agriculture subsidies would be overturned,” said the animal and produce farmer. “But in the meantime, I think it’s clear that at this protest is about a lot more. Not only us farmers are unhappy, but other areas, too. Because what’s coming out of Berlin is damaging our county — especially the economy.”

Above the crowd, regional flags fluttered in the bitter January air alongside the black, red and gold of the national standard. One slogan in particular was repeated on the placards: “The traffic light must go!” — a reference to the governing coalition of the Social Democrats, the Free Democrats and Greens, whose party colors evoke those of a traffic light.

Amid higher costs of living, coalition partners at loggerheads, a resurging debate over migration and now a budget crisis, approval ratings of Scholz’s government have plummeted to record lows in recent months.

Sound familiar?  Nobody is questioning whether Chancellor Scholz is in control of his faculties, unlike somebody you might have heard of.  Government officials are still willing to appear before their constituents, which is what you'd expect in a representative republic.

German Finance Minister Christian Lindner, meanwhile, was booed down by protesters as he took to the stage. “Get lost! Get lost!” chanted the crowd as they huddled together, many of them keeping warm with hot coffee and mulled wine distributed by fellow protesters. In some corners, flares were set off, sending green and black smoke across protesters’ heads.

Among the crowd was Ronny Thiele, a 43-year-old psychology student from Berlin.

“Stop the traffic light. We are the state,” read his placard. “I’m here in solidarity with the farmers. But for me it’s also important that we don’t hand all the power to individuals and that instead the power remains distributed among the people,” he said.

Those smoke flares sound kinda insurrectiony to me. So far, the palace guard media have not trotted that out, although they are sniffing whatever the German version of ULTRAMAGA is. "The general discontent with the German government at the farmers’ protests has also been an opportunity for far-right extremists." Right after that sentence, and without any irony, we read this. "Despite calling for the abolition of subsidies in its party program, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which for months has polled as the second-strongest party in Germany, has seized the opportunity to show solidarity with the agriculture industry."  I'm not seeing any 4-H collectives drilling with their pitchforks and spades, but that doesn't stop the pushers of The Narrative.

Known far-right groups including the Free Saxons, the Third Way and the Homeland have also mobilized on social media in recent weeks, fueling talk of uprisings to “dismantle” the government, which Scholz described Saturday as “nonsense.”

Earlier this month, the German Farmers’ Association distanced itself from extremist groups after some 100 farmers prevented Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck from disembarking from a ferry following a private trip.

“It is becoming clear that something has started to slip in recent years, which is limiting legitimate democratic protest and freedom of expression,” Habeck said in a video posted on X, formerly Twitter. “Calls are circulating with coup fantasies, extremist groups are forming and ethnic-nationalist symbols are being openly displayed.”

Even some of the demonstrators in Berlin on Monday worried that the protests — and the country — could be hijacked by the far right.

“I’m worried that society is sliding to the right,” said Andreas Bartsch, 57, a cattle farmer attending the demonstration. “A lot of people have lost their belief in the government and then some people see only the AfD as an alternative. But things are increasingly decided up top. And those up top need to talk to people before decisions are made.”

There is no libertarian tradition as we understand it in Germany, which means the likes of a Tea Party or a Leave us Alone coalition isn't there.  To the extent, though, that government officials denounce all opposition as the next incarnation of You-Know-Who, you only make it more likely that people might think You-Know-What wasn't all that bad.  (We saw that phenomenon from another corrupt establishment, seventy years or so ago, when it was demonizing civil rights advocates as communists.)

But if you're employed by Fake News CNN, you have to sound the alarm. "Protests sweep Germany as far-right spots an opening."  Note what the reporters decry, and ask yourself, dear reader, whether the coverage would be as critical if those roads were being blocked by people yelling "From the river to the sea," which is truly far scarier in the original German.

In the shadow of the iconic Brandenburg Gate, a convoy of up to 500 tractors lined up every day last week in freezing pre-dawn temperatures. To keep themselves warm, farmers lit fires and drank hot mugs of tea and coffee.

Major road blockages have stretched across cities from east to west including Hamburg, Cologne, Bremen, Nuremberg and Munich – with up to 2,000 tractors registered for each protest. Images showed convoys of tractors and trucks, some with protest banners, blocking German roads from the early-morning hours.

Outside cities, Germany’s fast-moving motorways have also been targeted by protesters, severely disrupting the flow of traffic.

Read on, though, and you get the sense that those Unelected Bureaucrats did what comes naturally.

“I am here to protest for a new election in this country, because we are in difficulties with our government,” Martin, a farmer from Rügen who was protesting in Berlin, said. “They don’t hear us, they make regulations that harm every one of us, not only the farmers but everyone in this country. And we think enough is enough.”

Steven, a farmer from Western Pomerania who did not give his last name, said: “All the farmers standing here are worried about their livelihoods, about the livelihoods of farmers… This will only stop if the government resigns and there are other solutions.”

Scholz’s government sparked a backlash in December when it made unexpected changes to a 2024 budget draft, modifying some of its planned subsidy cuts on January 4. Farmers say this doesn’t go far enough, however, and are calling for a complete reversal.

In a parliamentary republic it is politicians, not constituents, who initiate votes of no confidence.  I am not aware of initiative, referendum, and recall being available to Germans.  That Alliance party, though?  In the way of populist coalitions elsewhere in the developed world, it's a bundle of national security and libertarian aspirations.

For Johannes Kiess, a sociologist specializing in right-wing extremism at the University of Leipzig in eastern Germany, the AfD’s involvement in the unrest doesn’t come as a surprise.

He points out that although the AfD’s own manifesto does not support the interests of Germany’s farmers, the far-right party has a history of exploiting division.

“The AfD is trying to fuel the debate further in order to damage the image of democratic institutions and processes, and most importantly the current government,” Kiess told CNN.

“To this end, it tries to increase the polarization using existing cleavages like rural versus urban.”

He continues: “The AfD used the Eurozone crisis as a window of opportunity to get started in the first place. Activists from the far-right were literally waiting for such an opportunity and with the so-called refugee crisis in 2015 they got a second crisis that helped them grow considerably.

“Migration is known as the bread-and-butter-issue for the far-right. Since then, the AfD has indeed used every crisis to fuel polarization, for example the pandemic, the war against Ukraine. Sometimes it works well, sometimes not.”

According to Kiess, the AfD has a clear market-liberal stance advocating for the abolishment of all kinds of subsidies, including those for farmers, directly flying in the face of what the farmers are protesting for.

“And they are against climate friendly subsidies in particular, which could help farmers transform their businesses to make them environmentally and economically more sustainable.

Note that nowhere in that quote does Academician Kiess raise the possibility that the technocrats, whether in Brussels or Berlin, got the Eurozone and the migration policies and relations with Russia wrong.