Habeck: Angry farmers trap German minister on ferry

alphacyberranger@lemmy.world to World News@lemmy.world – 64 points –
Habeck: Angry farmers trap German minister on ferry – DW – 01/05/2024
dw.com
7

Farmers and Nazis protesting - well, alright. Let's give them what they want.

Protests for climate - everybody goes insane. Over my dead body!

This time line is fucked up, Germany is fucked up. I'm ashamed for my country.

As if it was better in other countries. No one wants to truly tackle this shit. Not the companies, not the politicians, not the voters. We'll get what's coming for us, and we deserve every little bit of it.

I can't help but see it the same way. I don't even know why I should keep trying at this point.

I just do my part but aside from that I've given up. It's just to keep my conscious clean at the very least. But who the fuck knows what others will do. I very much expect some people to radicalize themselves further to the point where we see proper climate terrorists pop up.

This weren't farmers but Neonazis from the "IdentitäreBewegung" acting as farmers.

They're trying to destroy the political dialog by agitating some far right idiots to act as this stupid.

The annoying thing is, the law enforcement hardly works. not one of the people from that coup is currently in prison. So we can expect the executive in Germany does not have any interest in a democratic state anymore.

This is the best summary I could come up with:


German Deputy Chancellor Robert Habeck and his wife were held up for several hours late on Thursday on their return from a private vacation, as roughly 250 to 300 farmers blockaded the port their ferry was docking at, preventing those on board from disembarking.

Farmers were angered last month when they bore part of the brunt of a large hole that emerged in Germany's 2024 budget and future spending plans.

Habeck is relevant to this issue for two reasons: he was one of the three party leaders, along with Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Finance Minister Christian Lindner, to negotiate a way out of the budget impasse; and his portfolio also includes considerable if shared responsibility for energy and climate policies.

The tactics used by farmers in the protests, using their tractors to form massive queues and block traffic, and in some cases even dumping manure on public roads, had already prompted criticism.

"We stand by the compromise," Özdemir said, referring both to the delayed removal of diesel subsidies and another concession, agreed just this Thursday, to keep farmers exempt from paying road tax on their agricultural vehicles.

Hendrik Wüst, a Christian Democrat who heads the government of Germany's most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia, similarly said that Thursday night's behavior "damages the farmers' justified cause and must have consequences."


The original article contains 901 words, the summary contains 217 words. Saved 76%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Context for anyone not from Germany:

The farmers are outraged at the government planning to remove a tax exemption on tractor diesel fuel. The protests are strongly associated with Germany's far-right, and they have previously called to hang the chancellor and several ministers, and brought gallows to protests.