TRACTORS, TRADE, AND TRANSITION: Policy Feedback and the 2023-2024 Farmers Protests Under CAP 2023-2027

Between autumn 2023 and throughout 2024, farmers’ protests erupted across the European Union (EU), with mass mobilisation flaring up simultaneously in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Poland, Romania, and other Member States (MSs). Given the EU-wide nature of the mobilisation, these protests represent a qualitatively distinct episode of agricultural contentious politics, hence marking a critical moment in the politics of the EU climate transition. While protests drew on national triggers and sectoral particularities, they nonetheless converged around three common issues at the EU level: perceived pressures on farm incomes, more burdensome and stricter environmental regulations, and perceived unfair trade competition. To make sense of EU-wide mobilisation, this contribution investigates how the design of the post-2020 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), newly incorporating the Green Deal objectives, contributed to these protests by reshaping farmers’ identities, political positionalities, and emotional landscape(s). Employing a combined approach of policy analysis and protests’ discourses analysis, it explores whether and how the new CAP architecture, marked by the layering of conflicting goals such as income support, environmental sustainability, and strategic trade openness, generated shared negative interpretive feedback that catalysed cross-border mobilisation. Employing Policy Feedback Theory (PFT) as the theoretical framework, and particularly focusing on its interpretive dimension, the contribution conceptualises the CAP not merely as a distributive instrument but as a meaning-producing institution that shapes the perceived social status and legitimacy of its target groups. Amid the shift from “exceptionalism” to “post exceptionalism” in CAP, the post-2020 CAP reform, with its layering of conflicting goals, is analysed as an incoherent policy architecture that sends conflicting signals to farmers regarding their role in the EU polity in the midst of the green transition: were they partners in sustainability, global market competitors, or disposable relics of a past policy paradigm? Methodologically, the contribution employs a comparative case study design based on Most Similar Systems Design (MSSD), selecting France and Italy as case studies. Combining policy analysis of CAP texts and National Strategic Plans (NSPs) with discourse analysis of protest narratives, it finds that despite national differences in agricultural structure, political context, protest organisation, and national CAP implementation, farmers in both countries experienced the CAP reform as a delegitimising force. Protest narratives centred on symbolic exclusion, loss of recognition, and moral grievances linked to perceived feelings of betrayal, policy injustice, and existential threat to traditional agricultural identities. The shared interpretive grievances suggest that, while national variables shaped the form and tone of mobilisation, EU-level layered policy design proved decisive in overriding local buffers and fostering convergence in protest narratives.