As political deadlocks grow, everyday life becomes filled with absurd rules. Criteria that resemble not rules for living but regulations for managing annoyances. This is how social automatism is established: each person on their own, against everyone else, with the authority to act as both referee and director of the conflict.
The government is actively contributing to this. Not alone. Together with an opposition that has forgotten how to articulate a political proposal. That limits itself to the politics of the self-evident. To generalities, platitudes, «musts» without «hows» and «just demands» without a plan of action. Thus, even a government with criminal policies can renew its term, precisely because it knows that social discontent finds no political expression. It finds no party. It finds no collective mind.
What is happening today with farmers is the clearest reflection of this situation. On the one hand, society widely recognizes their rights. On the other hand, that same society demands that their protests not cause any disturbance. Not exert any pressure. Not incur any costs. Not disrupt the small comforts of everyday life. The familiar «yes, but.».
This is precisely where the victory of power lies. In turning every collective demand into a problem of form. Not of content. To divert attention from the cause and fix it on the symptom. From why they protest to how they protest. From the plundering of production to the traffic jam on the national highway.
We saw the same thing after the crime in Tempi. Mass demonstrations, social shock, and immediately afterwards, poisoning of public opinion with false dilemmas, fabricated doubts, technical details that drown out the essence. It's the old, tried-and-tested propaganda: if you can't deny the fact, blur its meaning.
In the OPEC scandal, the country is watching a theater of the absurd. Not only about the facts, but about the way in which attempts are being made to divert attention. We are not discussing how public money was plundered, but whether «Frapes» is really Frapes. Whether it is instant coffee or espresso. Whether you drink it with sugar or stevia. Those in power know very well that when society discusses trivial details, it fails to see the looting.
But let's get back to the farmers.
Today's agricultural protests have two characteristics that terrify the system. First, their representatives are not like the old agricultural unionists who were party loyalists. They are people who know their subject, speak specifically, and do not parrot party lines. Second, the parties are unable to control them. Not by choice, but by incompetence. They have forgotten how to be a confrontational opposition. They limit themselves to videos of sympathy and statements of «understanding,» like social affairs reporters.
Society, for its part, stands by the farmers with asterisks. As if to say: «We're with you, but don't make too much noise.» But every protest exists only because it incurs a cost. Teachers exert pressure by losing lessons. Workers by going on strike. Farmers don't have factories to shut down. They have roads. And they shut them down.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis knows this. That is why he talks about ’limits« every day. Not political limits, but limits of tolerance. First, he shapes public opinion around an invisible limit, and then he sends in the riot police to enforce it. This is how social automatism works: repression is presented as common sense.
But the farmers' problem is not temporary. It is not just the weather conditions or bad years. It is a hurricane of political choices that goes by the name of the European Union and the Common Agricultural Policy.
The CAP was not designed to support small producers. It was designed to restructure production in terms of the market. To reduce the number of farmers, concentrate land ownership, and turn food into a stock market commodity. Subsidies were not based on quality or product, but on acreage. Not what you produce, but how much space you occupy.
This gave rise to a parasitic logic. Crops were destroyed in the name of European distribution. Tobacco, sugar beets, fishing. Farmers were subsidized not to produce. Fishermen were subsidized to destroy their boats. The subsidy was the bait. Dependence was the trap.
Today, the same policy is returning in a more violent form. Farmers are at the mercy of cartels selling pesticides, fertilizers, seeds with rights, and extremely expensive energy. Middlemen increase the price tenfold from the field to the shelf. A young farmer says she needs to sell 16 kilos of wheat to buy a cup of coffee. And we are discussing whether the road was closed for half an hour.
And as if all that weren't enough, there is also the Mercosur agreement. Free trade with countries where production costs are incomparably lower, labor rights are non-existent, and environmental regulations are merely decorative. European agriculture is being called upon to compete with products produced under colonial conditions. The outcome is a foregone conclusion: the small players will disappear, the big players will survive, and the multinationals will triumph.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It is about deindustrialization. It is about a strategy that is turning the country into a tourist resort and a service annex. Agricultural land is being abandoned, devalued, and will ultimately be handed over to corporations. Greeks will have no connection to the production of their food. They will consume standardized products and work seasonally, cheaply, and expendably.
Those who survive will be the «Frapes» of the system. The middlemen, the contractors, the managers of poverty. Those who believe that the problem is the closure of the roads ignore that the road has already ended, it no longer exists. .
The European Union assures us that it loves farmers, as long as they do not cultivate, protest, demand survival, or exist.
Because the ideal farmer is the one who has a field, but the field does not have a farmer.
In the end, they will tell us that agriculture has not been lost. It has simply moved elsewhere.
In advertisements.
In documentaries.
In museums of folk culture.
And somewhere in between a coffee-free frappe and a Europe without production, they will ask us to applaud growth.
