A fox crosses the N-110 highway in El Burgo de Osma (Soria, 5,161 inhabitants) between crop fields on Thursday at dawn.
In the second largest municipality in the province, a group of farmers splits in two.
Some take their cars to the capital of Soria to try to meet with the Government's deputy delegate.
Others, with their tractors, leave in slow motion to Langa de Duero, about 30 kilometers away, where around twenty farm workers have gathered to participate in one of the unofficial protests in the sector that began on Tuesday.
The tractor unit starts at 10 in the morning between Spanish flags and at about 10 degrees, an unusually mild temperature for Soria in February, according to some protesters, who are against, however, the measures to alleviate climate change.
Andrés Calvo manages 300 hectares of land and points out a farm in the distance where he raises about 5,000 pigs.
“It's a shame, there are so many papers that have to be filled out,” he complains, at the side of the road.
He then says that he has always been right-wing.
Before he voted for the PP, but his ballot changed to Vox since his emergence onto the political board.
The formation of Santiago Abascal has entered transversally into all strata of the agricultural world, assuming and even leading his demands.
Now the popular ones are trying to recover the ground lost to the ultras in the Spanish countryside, and he does so, to a large extent, taking their speech as his own.
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Vox spurs the rural protest but does not control it
José Luis Monge, 53 years old, waits with another twenty farmers to circulate in formation.
They do not want to associate themselves with any political party, but they recognize that there are groups more sensitive than others to their demands.
“I may like the amnesty more or less, but I will look at a party that gives me a solution for the problems in the countryside,” says Monge, a cereal land tenant.
Like the majority, he attributes a good part of his hardships to “excess bureaucracy”, the entry of non-EU products “without the same controls” and environmental restrictions in Brussels.
Just two years ago, in the first chapter of the series
La España Silenciada
—published by Vox in the campaign for the autonomous elections of Castilla y León in February 2022—, Abascal spoke in a video with a farmer in a village in Palencia.
The ultra leader defends on stage an argument similar to the flags that agricultural workers wave today in their mobilizations throughout Spain.
After those elections, Vox entered for the first time into an autonomous government alongside the PP, precisely in one of the main popular fiefdoms with marked agricultural and livestock activity.
During the negotiation of that Executive, the extreme right took over the Ministry of Agriculture.
And after the elections of May 28, 2023, in new coalition pacts with the popular ones, he managed to add those of Aragón and the Valencian Community.
In Extremadura, he holds the Forest Management and Rural World portfolio.
“We were not going to give them the Treasury or the Economy,” sources from Genoa now argue.
These government agreements were the gateway for the extreme right to control agrarian policies.
José Luis Monge in front of his tractor in Langa de Duero.Claudio Álvarez
Regarding the distribution of the vote, Carlos Domínguez, from the 40dB. demographic agency, points out that Vox has managed to penetrate the countryside in a “cross-cutting” manner with a “supposedly close discourse”, regardless of the structure of the agricultural holding – latifundio or minifundio—, large holders or salaried workers.
In territories such as Castilla y León or the Region of Murcia, where the right was traditionally voted and with a strong primary sector, there was a “breeding ground” for Vox to expand, compared to communities like Andalusia, where the left was dominant. .
Although the situation is beginning to change.
The researcher at the University of Political Science of Salamanca (USAL) Álvaro González explains the changes this way: “The traditional class left tended to fight more for the rights of workers than what we can understand today for a post-materialist left, which fights more for social rights, reduction of inequality, LGTBI rights or environmental issues.
Many of these workers, due to their more traditional values in the rural world, feel further away from that struggle, what they call
the urban elite
.
Hence, the left of Europe is moving further away from that farmer from more traditional sectors.”
The regulations that restrict hunting or protect the wolf also influence.
And the Spanish identity issue against the independence movement.
The Podemos candidate for the European elections Irene Montero asked this Saturday in A Coruña to “defend” the farmers “even if the right tries to instrumentalize” the protests.
And she assured that her battle is a fight “against capitalism.”
Montero has on her list Diego Cañamero, a historic unionist from the left-wing Andalusian countryside.
Andrés Calvo, riding his tractor, in the province of Soria.Claudio Álvarez
The farmers' mobilizations have marked the political agenda of the week.
Abascal had the opportunity to directly question Pedro Sánchez during the first control session of the legislature with the president present, last Wednesday.
The leader of Vox spoke with Sánchez in the plenary session of Congress during the second day of farmers' mobilizations.
In the previous weeks, Sánchez had once again yielded to Junts by including those accused of terrorism in the amnesty law as long as their actions did not involve “serious violations of human rights.”
The president had also assured that "all Catalan independentists are going to be amnestied because they are not terrorists."
But Abascal did not mention the word amnesty during his intervention against Sánchez: his attacks focused on the farmers' protests.
Because there are many wars.
And you have to center the shot.
Also take advantage of the opportunity cost.
Sánchez responded to Abascal with the announcement that he will strengthen the Food Chain Law so that farmers do not sell at a loss.
And this Saturday he defended the Government's investment of 4,000 million euros in the agricultural sector.
“It does not need denialist or anti-European speeches, but more resources,” the president added.
He also promised to “simplify” the procedures of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).
Next to his tractor in Langa de Duero, the “young farmer”—as the logo on his green sweatshirt anticipates—Adrián Vicente declares that “it doesn't work out for him.”
He calls his situation unsustainable compared to that experienced by his father, from whom he inherited 220 hectares of irrigated land.
22 years old, he organizes with other young people through an Instagram account where they express their frustrations and schedule protests.
Vicente knows about the confrontation between Sánchez and Abascal the day before.
“Politicians never go down to the field.
They have to come and see things as they are,” asserts the young man, who had also heard statements made by Alberto Núñez Feijóo during the plenary session.
The leader of the PP used on Wednesday the same concept as the president of Vox to refer to certain environmental protection measures: “Environmental dogmatism.”
Listening to him, Abascal smiled sitting in his seat.
Feijóo coined that term to attack the Government and reaffirmed himself in the same words on Friday, during an interview on EsRadio.
The head of the opposition called the Executive “urbanite” and accused him of legislating from an office overlooking “La Castellana” in Madrid.
Concepts similar to those raised by the young farmer Vicente.
Privately, sources from the popular leadership accuse the Government of applying “the ideology” in the countryside.
The battle between the right is deepening with an eye on the Galician elections of 18-F, but above all on the horizon of the European elections scheduled for June, since the EU's action on the agricultural sector is key.
In the general elections in July, Vox suffered a sharp fall.
But the agricultural vote could be an incentive to come back in the next elections.
The PP needs both in Galicia and in the European elections a result that reaffirms Feijóo's leadership after the
shock
of last summer.
And both strive to transform the anger of the countryside into ballots.
Different popular sources observed a change in the speech of its leader in Congress, assimilated to ultra-arguments: Feijóo went so far as to describe Brussels as “a problem” for the agricultural sector.
A member of his closest core admits that the farmers' revolts could benefit Vox in the face of the European elections.
The ultras have few options to enter the Galician Parliament, but this source maintains that the protests do install a favorable “framework” for the Vox candidate for the Xunta, Álvaro Díaz-Mella.
“The 2030 Agenda is a betrayal of the Spanish people and the working class,” Abascal advocated the day before yesterday at a rally in Ourense, and attacked Feijóo for voting with the “progressives” and the “greens” in the EU.
In the midst of the struggle to capitalize on the farmers' vote, several Popular Party officials have also harangued the demonstrations in recent days.
The general secretary of the PP, Cuca Gamarra, went on Friday to a farm in Arganda del Rey, in the Community of Madrid, where she accused Sánchez of “protecting Puigdemont in Brussels more than Spanish farmers.”
“We are going to implement policies to guarantee the future of the countryside such as tax reductions, fiscal measures, legislative reforms, our commitment to making the CAP more flexible and changing those environmental regulations that leave the countryside without a present and without a future,” Gamarra stressed.
The political scientist Álvaro Sánchez appreciates a rapprochement in the popular speech to Vox in the face of the uncertainty of the Galician and European elections.
“The battle on the right is
a priori
more favorable for Vox.
The protesters are more inclined to this party because it is more defiant against the establishment and does not have political baggage that weighs it down.
Thinking in European logic, the president of the Commission is Ursula von der Leyen, of the European PP.
And farmers identify it with part of the problem,” explains the political scientist.
A thesis supported by the leader of Vox in Extremadura, Ángel García-Pelayo.
“The Popular Party says one thing and does another.
They have voted in the European Parliament in favor of 87% of all these restrictive regulations,” indicates the senator by autonomous designation, who signed the PP and Vox Government pact in Extremadura with María Guardiola after 28-M.
Feijóo, on a visit to a farm in Lalín, in Ourense.Álvaro Ballesteros (Europa Press)
Another coalition of PP and Vox ousted the PSOE from the Government of Aragon on March 28.
The ultras signed Ánger Semper, a member of the Agrarian Association of Young Farmers (Asaja).
And they gave him the Ministry of Agriculture.
“They called me because they agreed with my editorials.
The responsibility has to concern us with the care of the soil, water and air, but that cannot be elevated to the level of ideology,” he recalls by phone.
In the PP, Senator Lorena Guerra made her debut this June 23rd in the Cortes.
She is a farmer in Córdoba and was previously a member of the PP.
“The main defender of the environment is the farmer.
There are parties that do not understand the binomial agriculture-development, agriculture-environment.
And we are with the farmer.
The central government is harming us in everything.”
The accent changes drastically when crossing the border from Soria to Zaragoza.
In one of the first towns in the Maña province, Tarazona (6,138 inhabitants), José Antonio Morer comes home to eat after pouring urea on his land.
“Vox lately seems to support us a little in the field.
The PP, something too, but the PSOE not... Now, as we are demonstrating, Pedrito González [referring to Pedro Sánchez] is showing some interest.”
José Antonio Morer in Tarazona, province of Zaragoza.Claudio Álvarez
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