The agro-populist revolt sweeping across Europe has been similarly received by the left in each country, ranging from the Netherlands to Spain: labeling workers and organizations in the primary sector as “far-right.” This strategy aims to stigmatize protests that fail to monopolize the support of left-wing parties and unions, choosing instead to dismiss what they cannot control. However, European left-wing movements have long lost touch with the streets, appearing less in line with popular common sense and more aligned with the criteria of major financial forums. If the left decides to oppose the rural uprisings outright, it won’t be the rural world that is “canceled” by the left, but the left that ends up crushed beneath the wheels of tractors.
The leftist argument that the tractor protests are “right-wing” has a dual aspect. On one hand, they claim it is “far-right (neo)liberal,” “landowners,” “conservatives,” or “modernization elites.” On the other hand, they argue it is “far-right (neo)conservative,” “fascists,” “supporters of far-right political parties,” or the “plebeians of reaction.” While these accusations often intertwine in the progressive imagination, they should, in reality, describe two very different and incompatible realities. If the tractor protests were driven by business owners and entrepreneurs, they would be demanding less state regulation, more immigration, or fewer tariffs – typical interests of big capital that the representatives of the primary sector don’t seem to share.
Judging from the many opinions of leftists on social media, the mental mechanism allowing them to make contradictory accusations (calling the protests both “liberal” and “fascist”) is rooted in elitist and urban bias. The assumption is that a protester with a more polished appearance, articulate speech, or shiny machinery must be an oligarch, while someone with a humbler appearance must be a reactionary.
However, the tractor protests are not a “business closure” serving a few wealthy individuals. Other events supported by the left, such as the “feminist strike” or the “Catalan nationalist strike,” could be considered business closures, not to mention the actions of environmentalists disrupting traffic during working hours or vandalizing museums. The fact that these events receive applause from the same left that recently disregarded metalworkers from Cadiz, self-employed individuals, or truck drivers is a concerning indication of how “this left is undermining working-class consciousness” (in the words of Nazaret Martín, one of the prominent figures of agro-populism).
It is true that we are not witnessing a peasant revolt in the style of the dispossessed from feudal times, which may no longer be possible in the same way as in previous centuries. The rural structure today allows for a certain “class collaboration” with common interests: wage laborers alongside self-employed workers with means of production and small business owners. After all, the reality of agriculture in our country consists of small, professionally managed family farms, experiencing an economic model that has forced many farmers to become mini-entrepreneurs.
Sometimes, these realities pose a challenge to the more outdated segment of materialistic leftism, which continues to dream of revolutions with a sickle in hand against an imaginary latifundia aristocracy (now replaced by investment funds). This left, often critical of the conservative virtue of nostalgia, may itself be guilty of a nostalgic view of class struggle from the past century, without updating its perspective in the light of “green” globalist capitalism.
If we could convince the left that the big bourgeoisie is not behind the tractor protests, we would still need to persuade them that these protests are not composed of what they call “fascist-poor,” i.e., people incapable of exercising economic oppression over others but still considered “oppressors” due to their politically incorrect ideas – non-diverse, non-sexual, eco-feminist, pluri-national, and multi-cultural. To quote the derogatory words of TVE’s commentator María José Pintor Sánchez-Ocaña, “there, we see a lot of beards and bald heads, older gentlemen.” Similarly, Gessamí Forner in El Salto questions the support for the protests, suggesting that “the majority are men, white, with land ownership and the ability to ask for a loan from the bank to buy agricultural machinery.” In other words, they may not be rich (because indebting oneself with the bank doesn’t seem like the greatest economic privilege), but they don’t have a Eurovision-worthy appearance to avoid suspicion of being part of the “far-right sphere.”
From the “progressive sphere,” a couple of scenes seeming to confirm the double accusation have been amplified ad nauseam. On one hand, images of well-dressed individuals in hunting attire parading their high-end John Deere tractors. On the other hand, photos of tractors with national-Catholic symbolism. Undoubtedly, elements of both exist among the tractor protests, posing the biggest challenge to a movement that must be genuinely popular and cross-cutting. Or, more accurately, they are the second biggest problem because the first is the left willing to magnify the absolutely minority presence of such elements.
