Welcome to the Eurointelligence podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me are Zuzana Monshank and Jack Smith.

This morning we would like to talk about farmers and farmers' protests that have sprung up all over Europe.

There was a funny scene when Victor Orban descended on Brussels and he got out of his car and immediately spotted a farmer's protest, which is these days

not that hard to spot in European big cities. And he immediately spotted an opportunity to express

solidarity with a populist cause for him. And the classic slogan that is the people versus the

establishment, as though he was a member of the

people. But the farmers' protests are serious. They're not just the usual. I mean, we've had

farmers' protests in times past, and I remember when we lived in Brussels, we had a lot of farmers'

protests at the time, but they were much more singular. They were about specific issues that

French or Belgian farmers in that particular case had against the government.

This is different because it's happening everywhere.

Jack, you wrote about the farmers party, the Farmers' Citizens Movement in the Netherlands.

It was a strange story at the time.

And just I think this is where it started and it's not where it ended.

Oh, yeah, the farmer citizen movement.

What a story.

So if you want to date it back to its origin, you could say that this entire thing basically

began with a long-running dispute in the Netherlands over what to do about nitrogen

emissions. Naturally, when you use kind of nitrogen-based fertilizer, some of that ends up getting

into the environment, and that can have an effect on ecosystems. This was a problem in the Netherlands

for a couple of reasons. One of them is that the Netherlands has quite a large agriculture industry,

so it's actually the, well, at least as of last year,

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