Political Orientation and Farmers’ Protests in Germany

In early 2024, German farmers took to the streets to voice their discontent with the current situation in the agri-food system. The protests attracted considerable attention from the public, often portrayed to be undermined by far-right groups. In this study, we analyse whether reasons to protest are associated with farmers’ political orientation. We conducted an online survey with over 300 German farmers that elicited farmers’ reasons to protest with an open-ended question and their political orientation (left-right scale). We analyse the text data using wordclouds to explore main words to explain protest motivation, keyness analysis to study differences between political orientations, and structural topic modelling (STM) to explore whether topics and how they are expressed differ between groups. We find that 63.3% of farmers self-categorize into centre-left (with the majority being centre) and 36.7% as being centre-right. However, despite the oft-cited infiltration of far-right groups in farmers’ protests, we do not find significant differences in protest participation and support by political group. While the initial wordcloud analysis reveals that farmers from both groups are broadly concerned about the same topics, such as politics and bureaucracy, the keyness analysis reveals distinct differences between political groups. Centre-left farmers frequently use terms like `government' and `must', whereas centre-right farmers favour words such as `state', `green', and `bad'. The STM revealed the following six main protest reason topics: market pressure; bureaucratic burden and regulation; systemic dissatisfaction; climate policy and financial responsibility; government discontent; and bureaucracy overload. Centre-right farmers are significantly more likely to complain about market pressure, bureaucratic burden and regulation and to express grievances in relation to systemic dissatisfaction. In contrast, they are less likely to express government discontent compared to centre-left farmers. There is no difference between the groups in relation to climate policy and financial responsibility and bureaucracy overload. In addition to talking about specific topics more frequently, farmers from the two political groups also express their grievances in a different manner. For example, in relation to the topic "political frustration and discontent with government" differences in expressions are evident. Centre-left farmers frequently use the word “government”, while centre-right farmers are more likely to use the word “society“. These findings have important implications with potential to improve the effectiveness of policy responses. Specifically, our findings contribute to a more differentiated understanding of farmers’ protests and open avenues for designing policy interventions and communication strategies that resonate more effectively with different farmer groups.