Why tractors are voting louder than parliaments

I distrust the melodrama of slogans, even when they are painted on a hay bale. Yet the tractor convoys against the EU-Mercosur agreement are not a mere “carnival.” They reveal a structural truth of our constitutional, pluralist regimes: interests do not disappear because economists promise aggregate gains, they organize, they lobby, they obstruct, they negotiate. This is not a pathology, it is the normal physiology of liberty. @Les « groupes de pression » — organisations cherchant à influencer l’opinion, l’administration ou les gouvernants sans exercer directement le pouvoir — sont inhérents à la nature des régimes constitutionnels‑pluralistes, car il serait contradictoire d’y admettre la mise en question du régime lui‑même tout en refusant la contestation des décisions particulières relatives aux intérêts matériels des groupes.

The real scandal is elsewhere, in the confusion of languages. The Commission speaks in GDP points and export percentages, the farmers speak in standards, dignity, and survival. These are not the same objects. A trade agreement is not judged only by the sum of benefits, but by the distribution of costs, and by the legitimacy of the rules that govern competition. When French breeders say, “lower standards,” they are not pleading for privilege, they are demanding symmetry of constraints, or compensation openly assumed.

Our democracies live by legality and by compromise, but compromise becomes poisonous when it manufactures an intermediate solution that satisfies no one and solves nothing. @Le principe, au sens de Montesquieu, des régimes pluralistes modernes est la combinaison du respect des lois (légalité) et du sens du compromis ; le bon fonctionnement d’une démocratie dépend d’un « bon usage du compromis », difficile à déterminer, car si le compromis est souvent fécond, notamment en économie, il peut, dans certains domaines comme la politique étrangère ou certains choix économiques, conduire à des catastrophes lorsqu’il s’intercale artificiellement entre deux politiques opposées. A safeguard clause promised for “later” is the typical half-measure.

If Brussels wants ratification without rural revolt, it must choose: either enforce equivalent standards at the border, or admit the political price of free trade and pay it transparently.