The empty boots of German farmers tell a story of hardship, fuel wars and far-right threat

Rural protests draw on a populist playbook. But farmers’ legitimate grievances could be addressed with progressive policies

In my local area in rural Brandenburg, every village signpost offers the same harrowing sight: a pair of wellingtons dangling from the metal frame, often marked with a cross sprayed on to the green rubber. The boots started appearing just before Christmas after the German government, a coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals, announced that tax exemptions for farm vehicles and diesel would be scrapped. The boots are supposed to express the farmers’ current campaign of resistance as well as their longstanding grievances. The raw symbolism of the empty boots gets to me every time, no matter how politically wary I am of the protests.

In Germany, as in many other industrial nations, farmers have an exceptionally high suicide rate. Sometimes, as in cases of pesticide poisoning, it is not clear whether work accidents are actual accidents or covert “deaths of despair”, as sociologists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have called the epidemic of rural suicides in the US.

And farms die, too. Since the early 1990s, every second farm in Germany has closed down. Even now, many simply cannot be made profitable, no matter how hard or how constantly their owners or tenants work. Working conditions entirely out of sync with normal standards also mean that very few children of farmers want to inherit their parents’ professions – if there are children, given how many farmers find it hard to find partners willing to share their way of life. And now the cuts in subsidies: as backward-minded as the focus on fuel might seem, the complaints are partly justified. There simply is no current alternative to fossil-fuel use in agriculture. For your commute to work – still tax-deductible in Germany – you could actually switch to a bus. Not so for tilling your soil. Similarly to the yellow vest protests in France, we are seeing a backlash against pseudo-green austerity policies.

Nevertheless, it does seem rather out of step for the farmers to complain about cuts. They are subsidised in a unique way within our market economy. On average, farmers’ profits even rose last year. The EU subsidy system gives preference to big farms, as payments are linked to hectares. Those shiny, 10-tonne tractors blocking the roads are worth the equivalent of a family home. Nevertheless, even the winners experience that support system as a source of humiliation or dispossession.

The bureaucracy ties subsidies to ever-shifting conditions. It nudges farmers to be more environmentally friendly, and threatens huge fines should mistakes enter their calculations. Farmers are painfully aware, and often secretly ashamed, that their money is not made in rubber boots, but at the desk. According to the late David Graeber, one of the effects of bureaucracy is to make people feel stupid, and this is most sorely felt in a profession so often stereotyped as primitive.

This winter, yearly payments were withheld after a software system crash, adding to the sense of exposure to arbitrary rule. Some commentators find it surprising that farmers should sympathise with Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the rightwing party currently second in polls across Germany, given that the AfD’s party programme pledges cuts in farming subsidies.

Farmers can read all right. It’s just that like many a neoliberal entrepreneur, they hate the state that protects them. The market, however, offers even less security. At minimum, farmers are obliged to plan in a year-long cycle. Supermarkets, often de facto monopoly-holders over sales, set their prices in much shorter periods, reacting to global market fluctuations, making it impossible for farmers to budget securely.

As the relatively fringe association of small farmers, the AbL, has made clear, there would be a progressive way to criticise all this. Smaller farms should remain exempt from the fuel tax, and politically backed price guarantees need to be negotiated with retailers. Even more importantly, there need to be proper financial incentives and legal frameworks for a transition to climate-friendly and resilient forms of farming.

But this is not how the majority of farmers articulate their discontent. The boots are about something else. What gives the farmers’ mobilisation traction is a grammar it shares with rightwing protests in many arenas. It politicises not precarious social conditions, but precarious property. The cheap diesel is elevated to a sacred realm no one should trespass on, a focus that sheds all larger contexts. As a political theorist, I call such empty entitlement “phantom possession”, a vengeful reaction to the loss of privilege, as if that loss were an amputation of sorts. I did not ever expect to see it staged quite so literally as in all those looming, limbless boots. Once the cheap diesel is turned into phantom possession, distinctions between those who can and cannot afford it disappear. As does the question of which long-term structural changes in agriculture might make it less fossil-fuel dependent. Instead, any challenge to that diesel is experienced as an assault on freedom.

It’s a euphemism to say that the right are instrumentalising the farmers’ protests. With this logic, they are of the right. And they offer something to the right that surpasses the individualised phantom possession of fuel, namely a glimpse of state-sovereignty. Climate activists who block roads by glueing their bare hands to the ground are facing harsh prison sentences. In stark contrast, the farmers have been allowed to pose as though their coup had already been successful. They performed checks at blocked roads, letting ICU nurses pass only if they could provide convincing paperwork. The general strike that rightwing chat groups fantasised about in the run-up to the protests did not happen. But in brief scenes, it was prefigured.

A decent portion of the protesters genuinely distance themselves from neo-Nazi actors and the AfD. Others, however, form the core constituency of these groups. In 2020, a formation of about 200 tractors modelled the “Landvolk” logo on a large, dark field in northern Germany. Headlamps formed a white ploughshare; red tail-lights were grouped into the shape of a sword. This symbol stands for blood and soil. The revival of a 1920s rightwing terror group took place in the district of Nordfriesland, the same district where economy minister Robert Habeck’s ferry was prevented from landing by angry farmers earlier this month. The police did not ask the farmers for their IDs. Appeasing those forces is a very bad idea. But fixing the dire situation of smaller, ecologically minded farms is imperative.

• Eva von Redecker is a German philosopher and nonfiction writer

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