Farmers in Spain and the Netherlands politicized grievances into confrontational protests

Evidence

On April 2, 1995, thousands of farmers marched through the ancient streets of Santiago de Compostela, the provincial capital of Galicia, Spain’s most northern province. They were protesting on the doorstep of the provincial government. They demanded that the provincial and national government raise the milk quota given to Galician farmers and that the government, rather than the farmers, pay the fines for overproduction of milk. At about the same time, Dutch farmers were dumping dung on the doorstep of the Ministry of Agriculture in The Hague. Later that year, they occupied a provincial magistrate where the so-called manure rights were registered. Their protests were aimed at the government’s manure regulations that, in effect, forced farmers to reduce their stocks or to invest in alternative means of manure processing. In both Spain and the Netherlands, farmers were fighting provincial and national authorities because they felt that their interests had not been represented properly by their governments. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 4392

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete illustration of the three antecedent stages — shared grievance (milk quotas/manure rules), adversarial attribution (against government), involvement of society — matching the definitional framework in passage 4390.
• SHARE: The image of Dutch farmers dumping dung on the ministry’s doorstep is vivid enough to share with anyone interested in protest tactics.