This is the best summary I could come up with:
Von der Leyen’s sudden U-turn on one of her signature policies was not just an attempt to defuse a spreading continent-wide rural revolt over rising fuel costs, burdensome environmental regulations, retailers’ price squeezes and cheap imports.
But she has had to water down her green policies to placate a party so spooked by the “greenlash” against net zero legislation that it is rushing to reposition itself as the voice of gradual adaptation at a pace that citizens can accept and afford.
This is getting scary, and events such as the farmers’ furore are playing into the hands of populists such as France’s Marine Le Pen, Germany’s Alice Weidel and Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders, who thrive on grassroots grumbling against the metropolitan elites.
Remember former president Jacques Chirac, the Gaullist farmers’ friend, jovially slapping the hindquarters of cows in his southwestern Corrèze constituency or at the annual Paris agricultural fair.
Appeasing rural revolt may stop farmers blockading motorways or burning bales of hay outside government offices, but it is unlikely to herd them back towards the mainstream centre-right, given the depth of their discontent.
The meagre consolation for von der Leyen is that the rightwing populists cannot agree to sit in a single group in the European parliament because of personal, ideological or national rivalries.
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