V4 Populists Appropriate the Farmers’ Protests Ahead of the EP Elections ⋆ Visegrad Insight

V4 populist camps have long used social media to shape their image and rhetoric against the EU, but this has taken place without the wider context of European elections. The farmers’ protests mark an important shift, as a topic both diverse and emotionally effective enough to spark online uproar, which can be turned into the foundations of a populist campaign.

Standing amongst passing tractors and reminding farmers of the opportunity presented by the upcoming elections, Viktor Orbán records a video from Brussels with the caption: “We will stand up for the voice of the people! Even if the bureaucrats in Brussels blackmail us.”

Talking about how right the farmers are to protest against the Green Deal, Andrej Babiš ends his video: “It’s five to twelve!” Uploading similar content, others join the chorus: Brussels is an oppressor and a tyrant! Its policies are harmful, short-sighted and ludicrous! The Green Deal, Eastern enlargement and the agricultural policies are detrimental.

These are just some of the messages that now echo across the V4 social media landscape as populist camps test catchphrases ahead of the fast-approaching European Parliamentary elections.

With slogans that Brussels must be conquered, beaten, proven wrong or transformed from within, the elections are presented to social media audiences as their opportunity to spark change via the ballot boxes. In an attempt to galvanise even more followers, the online communications teams are losing no time to support the farmers’ protests, which might just be the low-hanging fruit ripe enough to transform comments into votes.

Unlike in 2019, when campaigning still involved media appearances, interviews and personal rallies, the introduction of possible topics for the 2024 elections began on social media. Cutting out the middle-man of traditional journalism and talking to their supporter bubble directly, actors running for an EP seat first trigger voter behaviour through posts, shares and likes. Creating content on a wide variety of platforms, their social media profiles also rely less and less on reproducing what has been already published elsewhere. It is rather the other way around: radio, television, and the written press have to keep up with what has already been posted online.

Public Image? Yes. Campaign Material? Maybe…

During the past year, with EP campaigning still in the distance, it was not a priority to relate social media activity directly to voter behaviour beyond the national level. Ideas were floated within domestic online bubbles with the intent of image-maintenance but without a larger pan-European strategy in view.

With the EP elections less than a hundred days away, the content creation of V4 radicals, populists, relativists, Eurosceptics and openly pro-Russian political groups has become more dynamic. Communications teams have been visibly gearing up in the past few months to interconnect various pertinent topics into a single, distinct and both politically and emotionally effective message.

Both highly engaged actors such as Orbán, Babiš or Robert Fico – who post several times a day – and those who are less involved such as Jaroslav Foldyna, László Toroczkai or Marian Kotleba – who post (a few times) a week – continue to repeat the already familiar message: the people must be protected from Brussels.

Orbán’s team have promoted the idea that change must occur because “Brussels abandoned Europeans,” Kotleba has warned his voters against the dangers of “servility to the EU,” while Babiš interpreted an article on how life in Europe will look like in 2040 by stating that the “Brussels octopus” had already “devised an idea for you.”

Nevertheless, the V4 digital arena has lacked a cohesive narrative, having to rely instead on all of these usual punches against Brussels, Ukraine, migration, further EU integration and enlargement. Although powerful and provocative, such posts could not go beyond flashy videos and holistic quotes aimed largely at domestic followers. This lack of purpose is also tangible in the repetitive nature of their comments.

Narratives tied to Ukraine, for example, have remained in the online public eye but have lacked mobilising nuance and the stronger network of arguments which could tie them to topics beyond the member state’s horizon.

Orbán’s team revisits these narratives in occasional posts and his Minister of Foreign Affairs addresses it also only to keep followers engaged. In a similar tone, Fico has posted that “the strategy of the West in Ukraine is not working.” In concert with Orbán, he reiterated that the “orientation of the government is towards peace, with a refusal of the government to continue the war, to send arms. Its focus being on civic projects.”

The topic of opposing support for Ukraine has thus been kept just above the threshold of visibility without a clear campaigning aim and only perpetuating the narratives of immediate peace and dysfunctional sanctions.

Calls for nationally sovereign decision-making have been equally lacking in context and agency. Kotleba advised Fico ahead of his Paris visit that “it’s high time to leave for Paris with a head held up high, as a prime minister of a sovereign state, and not as a gubernia of the EU or an obedient vassal of NATO”. László Toroczkai also posted a video on his YouTube channel about a conference in Prague, stating that “We want a Europe of free independent nations, instead of the current goal of Brussels, which is to create a united states of Europe.”

Why the Farmers’ Protests Matter 

As the ‘farmers’ protests were occurring in Prague on the same day, Toroczkai and his team decided to opt for an additional framing of his content. Aside from his conference speech, he also took to the streets with his colleagues and included the demonstrations in his video.

Jaroslav Foldyna left the same conference to post online from the protest, while Tomio Okamura also supported the public dissent, posting against the Green Deal and calling on his followers to vote on 7-8 May to “change this harmful politics.” Kotleba made his appearance on the same day while in a moving vehicle on the way to the farmers’ protests in Slovakia, connecting the demonstrations to the EU’s destructive policies. Many such posts have been created since Viktor Orbán’s team first published a video of him amongst the tractors during his Brussels visit in December.

Regardless of whether it was migration, Eastern enlargement of the EU, anti-EURO rattling, calls for independent foreign policy, or the domestic implementation of EU regulations, no issue could stimulate a boiling point of public opinion sufficient for a coherent social media campaign strategy. Co-opting the farmers’ protests, however, is already spurring online uproar. It is also adaptable to a wide array of issues, which in turn might even make it transferable to voter behaviour in favour of V4 populists.

For a start, because it is anti-elitist at its core, such content around the farmers’ protests is able to project disdain towards the intellectual, business and political establishment of Brussels, which allegedly works against the independence of the member states and the collective interest of Europeans. It becomes a political articulation of the traditional and rural collective unconscious and taps into the financial, ideological and emotional anxieties of many social media users.

It can also speak plainly to those online audiences who do not feel addressed by the abstract and often over-nuanced interpretations of mainstream media or the long and elaborate analyses in the press. It is often voiced in the comments that there is finally someone who understands and speaks the language of the people.

The social media format also allows such camps to exploit the benefits of concentrated explanations, but also those of over-simplified arguments and folkish humour. It enables them to create content with short and potent commentary, which their teams and followers can then reinforce in the comment section. They can also publish several seemingly unconnected posts which are then assembled into a single public image of themselves or their party when viewed with the rest of their social media page.

Tying it all together 

Practically no content published by V4 populists has presented the EU as a partner. This has ensured that the EU is constantly dehumanised, abstracted and viewed as beyond the reach of the people. Its goals have been portrayed as external to the national cause, with policies harmful to the European people and contrary to the raison d’état of sovereign states.

Up until the farmers’ protests, however, the other narratives mentioned above constituted only campaign ideas in the making. Now, as the production of such content attracts more attention – tractors have proven to be a trending topic for V4 populist profiles – even more content is being created.. Politicians and their social media teams have started diversifying these posts into something of an umbrella topic, connecting the farmers’ protests to a variety of different narratives.

Having already developed their images as leaders whose role it is to protect their citizens from the EU, populist politicians are now also projecting the image of themselves as the ones capable of taking up the fight with Brussels. They also appear in each other’s content. Pointing out foes, calling out names and blaming opponents, these posts combine comic effect, criticism and political competition.

This ranges from Babis and Kotleba ridiculing Brussels because it wants us to eat bugs and crickets – see Okamura’s argument made by connecting the Green Deal to migration, anti-Euro attitudes and the cost-of-living crisis – to Fico’s detailed critique of the European Commission on its import of agro-industrial commodities from Ukraine. Sometimes, this already takes the form of mutual international support to stop the Green Deal on the day of the newest protests in Prague. On other days preceding the protests, it is enough to include Silver, Babiš’s rooster, not wanting to eat imported Ukrainian grain “because it is contaminated and destroys our Czech agriculture” – with a at the end of the caption.

The social media discourse surrounding the farmers’ protests, peddled by V4 populists and their communications teams, thus appropriates farmers’ livelihoods, access to agricultural goods, local food production and the right to consume domestic groceries.

It is used to accommodate a wide repertoire of traditional, ethno-national sentiments, which tie into a number of complementary affairs. It constitutes one of the two pillars of social media image creation used by political candidates, the other being the similarly potent umbrella topic of national responses to war.

Following these dynamics of social media feeds allows us to keep our finger on the pulse of those who will compete in the EP elections, but also on the immediate reactions of their supporters. Ultimately, such content shows how topics can be manufactured and shaped according to supporter reactions, as politicians and their teams try to predict how their social media followers might behave as voters.

Unless the wind is taken out of the sails of all this populist rhetoric and alternate narratives are provided to enable the questioning of such posts, the exploitation of the farmers’ protests will quite rapidly transgress the digital arena and gain the operational form of offline and mainstream media campaigns across the V4 – and beyond.

And as these social media profiles are interconnected across the global social media universe of populists by tags, citations, reposts and other features, mutual political support could reach a cooperative threshold much sooner and could become far more effective than expected.

_