Farmers' Voices in European Protests: Diverse Complaints, Emotional Tones, and Policy Responses

The 2024 farmers' protests across Europe signaled widespread dissatisfaction in the agricultural sector. While low farm incomes and restrictive environmental regulations are commonly cited grievances, little is known about underlying motivations and individual farmers' reasons for protesting. This study explores individual farmers' protest motivations in Germany, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands to gain a deeper understanding of the diverse concerns shaping agricultural discontent across Europe. We analyze rich text data from 2232 farmers, collected through surveys using an open-ended question designed to elicit unprompted, top-of-mind protest reasons. By using a combination of hand and AI-assisted coding, we quantify protest reasons across countries, assess the emotional tone of farmers' answers, and explore how this aligns with policy responses. Our findings indicate that farmers' main protest reasons differ across the four countries, with German farmers mainly complaining about bureaucracy, French farmers about financial reasons, Belgian farmers expressing diverse complaints, while Dutch farmers focus mainly on the political environment. The emotional tone of farmers' answers reveals that specific, targeted complaints are more often expressed in an annoyed angry tone, while broader topics seem to trigger aggressive anger. Linking farmers' protest reasons to national and EU policy responses shows that, while some key complaints received adequate policy attention, environmental complaints were disproportionately prioritized by EU policymakers and some Member States. The findings from this study have important implications with the potential to improve the effectiveness of policy responses by contributing to the identification of adequate solutions to ease farmers' grievances.