Polish Farmers To Block Critical Border Road As Tusk Government Faces First Serious Challenge

Polish Farmers are planning to block a key frontier road into Germany as part of a growing protest over Europe’s green agenda and cheaper imports – primarily from Ukraine.

Farmers say they have been especially hit by increased taxes and other rules./ Photo: AFP

Protesters will block the main A2 highway from Warsaw to Berlin on Sunday for 24 hours, TRTWorld reports.

According to Dariusz Wrobel, a spokesman for the farmers’ protest movement, the EU’s so-called Green Deal on energy, transportation and taxation in a bid to reduce greenhouse emissions “is unacceptable in its current form.”

The farmers also oppose imports of agriculture products from countries outside the EU “that do not conform to European norms”, Wrobel said.

The highway protest at the German border would start at 1200 GMT on Sunday and would be just a warning.

“We expect results and we are ready to launch a much wider movement,” Wrobel said.

The farmers had planned a 25-day blockade but reduced it after talks with local authorities and business leaders. -TRTWorld

Meanwhile, as Remix News, sums it up – this is a major test for the Tusk government.

There is an old fable about succession. An old ruler leaves two envelopes for his successor and tells him to open the first one when a crisis arrives. The new ruler does just that and sees the advice, “Just blame everything on me,” with a footnote: “When the next crisis arrives, open the next envelope.” He follows the advice that gets him through the first crisis, but a second one eventually comes along, so he opens the second letter which reads, “Sit down right now, write two letters, and put them in envelopes.”

The Tusk administration has already opened up the first envelope in its response to the farmers’ protests by saying that their cause is just and that it was all the fault of the previous PiS government. 

There is an element of truth in that claim. It was the PiS government that opened up the border in a gesture of solidarity that was in Poland’s self-interest, but it failed to stop the opening of the EU market to Ukrainian food and only introduced an embargo on Ukrainian grain when the horse had bolted and was roaming the fields. 

It was also the PiS government that in 2019 had agreed to the EU’s “Fit for 55” climate policy, which contained the very measures farmers are currently protesting against. If it believed that it was trading EU funds in return for the policy, the EU establishment didn’t honor its side of the bargain. 

But just blaming PiS will not be enough for the Tusk government. Farmers don’t want PR stunts involving ministers saying they support the protests, they want concrete measures to deal with the situation. 

The problem is that the Tusk government cannot deliver these because the demands farmers are making are unacceptable to Brussels as they run counter to the climate dogma, the dogma that PiS does not agree with but failed to counter. Unfortunately for the farmers, the new government was supported by Brussels and is therefore hitched to it. 

Tusk’s government also cannot introduce a blanket embargo on Ukrainian food products because that is an EU decision and also because of its political commitment to supporting Ukraine.

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