A-Infos (en) Italy, UCADI, #181: The peasant anger of the Germans (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

For months now, an unprecedented wave of strikes has shocked Germany as 
a consequence of the economic crisis produced by the crisis of the 
German economic system, based on the low cost of energy, guaranteed by 
the agreements stipulated with Russia and which failed as a result of 
the war in Ukraine . The disproportionate increase in energy costs has 
forced the German government to massively subsidize both the energy 
consumption of industry and that of private citizens, and to reopen some 
coal-fired power plants, in an attempt to reduce the impact of the 
higher cost of energy on production and on wages. The budget and 
industrial and agricultural production were affected by these choices 
and the country effectively entered into recession, with catastrophic 
consequences on the public budget which, due to the constraints adopted 
by Germany as a result of the shock suffered by the strong inflation 
after the end of the First World War - which destroyed the country's 
economy and paved the way for Nazism - cannot operate at a loss, but 
must necessarily break even.
Faced with the needs of the war and even before due to Covid and the 
expenses necessary to contain it both from an epidemic point of view and 
for the economic effects that the epidemic has produced on the country's 
production capacity, a ploy was actually devised by foreseeing that it 
was possible to spend in deficit for sudden and exceptional needs. The 
next step was to declare both Covid and the war exceptional events; 
therefore it was possible to carry out budget deficit expenditure. This 
made it possible to find the resources necessary to deal with Covid but 
even more so to allocate substantial resources (around EUR100 million) 
for the supply of weapons to Ukraine, to pay the ordinary operating 
costs of a failing state, taking on the cost of the Ukrainian budget. 
Still other resources were needed to manage the flow of Ukrainian 
refugees and welcome them, but now the problems come to a head.
However, as a result of the green policies adopted by the European 
Union, the country is committed to completing the energy conversion of 
the production system, eliminating nuclear power plants, decommissioning 
fossil energy power plants and drastically reducing carbon dioxide 
emissions and to bring about To complete this program, considerable 
resources will be needed that the federal budget does not currently 
possess. However, the result of the energy transition policies in 
Germany seems to be there so much so that last year greenhouse gas 
emissions decreased by over 20 percent, reaching the lowest level since 
the early 1950s, but the decline it came mostly from the reduction of 
industrial production, and not from its reconversion to renewable 
energy. Only 15 percent of all emissions reductions come from 
technological innovations such as the use of renewable energy. German 
companies are simply transferring their production abroad - where there 
are no ambitious emission reduction targets like the German ones - or 
reducing their activities.
BASF, the world's largest chemical group, has announced permanent staff 
cuts at its headquarters in Ludwigshafen due to high energy prices. 
While German gross domestic product fell by 0.3 percent, that 
represented by energy-intensive activities such as the chemical and 
steel industries plummeted by 11 percent. A positive fact would be the 
fact that electricity produced from alternative sources has exceeded 50 
percent of the total, but the government does not seem to understand how 
critical the situation is that the German manufacturing sector is facing.
The Constitutional Court of Karlsruhe has rejected the establishment of 
special extra-budgetary funds for the financing of environmental 
policies and has established that the article of the Constitution which 
since 2009 prohibits deficit spending above 0.35 percent of Annual GDP, 
was violated by the trick with which the government intended
finance its policies. The only possible exception to the 
constitutionalized "debt brake" is represented by the declaration of a 
state of emergency, which has already been used - as mentioned - for 
support allocations to individuals and businesses during the Covid 
pandemic and for aid to Ukraine attacked by Russia, but the Court ruled 
that policies in favor of the energy transition cannot be classified as 
measures caused by an emergency. Thus the government was left with no 
other option than to resort to a tax increase which hit the agricultural 
sector in particular and therefore the farmers who went on strike 
together with all the other categories of workers whose wages are 
affected grip of inflation.

An unprecedented wave of strikes

The protests that are blocking Germany are taking place in a country 
that last year experienced a recession equal to 0.3 percent of GDP, 
while a rebound of no more than 1 percent is expected for 2024, to be 
optimistic. In this situation, the goal of becoming a "climate neutral" 
country damages Berlin's economy and is incompatible with the costs of 
war. n order to make ends meet, the government found itself having to 
make draconian cuts amounting to 17 billion euros in the various budget 
items so as not to compromise those relating to the
energy transition and had the unfortunate idea of intervening on 
subsidies to agricultural producers, already in difficulty due to the 
increase in energy prices and the costs of applying ecological 
regulations, and the expenses necessary to guarantee animal welfare 
which have accumulated in recent years. Consequently, subsidies for 
diesel used for mobility and rural work (equal to 2,900 euros per farm) 
and exemption from road tax for tractors and agricultural machinery have 
been abolished.
Thus the protest spread to different categories, the railway workers' 
strikes blocked public transport, while metalworkers and public sector 
employees, including teachers, had already taken to the streets in 
December. In recent weeks, across sectors from metallurgy to 
transportation to education, nurses have staged protests over the 
economy's stunted growth and rising wages and prices. But that's not 
enough: The Mittelstand, the middle class, protests and the consequences 
are being felt. Germany is built on the Mittelstand: small and
very small businesses, be it a painter, a heating installer, a 
bricklayer, a farmer, a farm, whatever it is, prosperity and well-being 
are based on these thousands of businesses.
Therefore the protest is growing hour by hour, without distinctions 
between Lands.

The tractors occupy Berlin

So on January 13 the demonstrators camped near the Door at temperatures 
below zero, beer and mulled wine. Thousands of tractors blocked highways 
and major German cities against cuts to agricultural subsidies. blocking 
them and going so far as to occupy the Brandenburg Gate as a sign of 
protest against the cuts announced by the government at the end of the 
seven days of blockades and mobilisations; farmers were joined by the 
rail transport strike which between Wednesday and Friday kept 80 percent 
of trains stopped in stations across the country and the
mobilization continues.

Tractors in front of the Brandenburg Gate, in Berlin, following protests 
by German farmers

Tractors outside the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin as German farmers 
protest. The demonstrations prompted the government to partially 
withdraw the reductions, promising to reinstate a discount on car taxes 
and phase out a diesel subsidy over several years. years rather than 
immediately. But farmers argue that this is an insufficient measure and 
are asking the government to completely reverse the announced cuts.
The farmers' demonstrations, inevitably targeting the government, have 
also attracted far-right demonstrators, raising fears that extremists 
are trying to take advantage of the protests. The far-right AfD is 
enjoying a surge in popularity, with between 21 and 23 percent 
nationwide in terms of voting intentions and over 30 percent in some 
parts of former Germany. East. It is a fact that the right has well 
understood the contradiction arising from the government's unconditional 
support for intervention in Ukraine and it is no coincidence that it 
speaks out against this choice which constitutes an objective cause of 
the economic difficulties that the government would be able to address 
with different strategies and above all with greater economic 
availability if only it looked at the objective interests of the country.
Farmers make no secret of their opposition to the war and Ukraine's 
entry into the Union because they well remember the undue competition 
from Ukrainian cereal products on the European market which hit their 
profits, leaving part of the wheat and corn harvest unsold, but also 
other cereals. Knowing well the mechanisms of the common agricultural 
policy and living on lavish community subsidies, German farmers know 
well that a possible entry of Ukraine into the Union would end up 
absorbing most of the community resources intended for the
agricultural sector, and this is due to the mechanisms of rebalancing of 
the agricultural market and management of surpluses that characterize 
community agreements and the management of the agricultural market. The 
fascist and Nazi right, unsurprisingly, is against the war in Ukraine, 
and against the sending of weapons, and speculates on this contradiction 
by driving a powerful wedge into the mood of the electorate, and 
creating the conditions for the increasingly probable crisis of the 
government red-green and the growth of its electoral consensus which it 
intends to exploit by expelling migrants. Against this hypothesis and 
against the right, on Sunday the 21st, one and a half million people 
took to the streets throughout Germany. However, the country is sliding 
towards technical recession and the government is engulfed in the 
scandal of the budget tricks it resorted to to disguise the fact that it 
was operating at a deficit; in
this situation admitting the excessive and unsustainable costs of war 
becomes inevitable.

GL

https://www.ucadi.org/2024/01/23/la-rabbia-contadina-dei-tedeschi/
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