Greece’s farmers are escalating protests from road blockades to open confrontation as government responds with repression.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPCBVvEZzd4
Freedom News || After more than ten days of nationwide mobilisation, farmers’ protests last week escalated into open confrontation and clashes with riot police. Protesters have faced arrests and upgraded charges, while in Crete authorities are threatening to prosecute farmers under accusations of forming a “criminal organisation.”
From the mountains of Macedonia and Epirus to the plains of Thessaly and Aitoloakarnania, and from olive-growing Messinia to tourist-heavy Crete, thousands of low- and lower-middle-income farmers have taken to the roads. National highways have been shut down, cutting key transport routes and effectively splitting the country into parts. Tractor convoys are marching through major towns and cities, border crossings, ports and airports have been occupied for hours, and state institutions have been targeted with militant interventions. The farmers’ movement has moved decisively beyond symbolic protest.
Mainstream media coverage has been sensationalist, with repeated references to “lawlessness” and occasional headlines warning of “insurrection”. This framing supports a broader state narrative that seeks to manipulate the meaning of the protests and brand farmers who confront police repression as “criminals”. Government officials, echoed by media commentators, recycle the familiar distinction between the “good” and the “bad” or “violent” protester.
This escalation is unfolding under a centre-right government that includes figures with far-right political backgrounds and rhetoric, and is already facing corruption scandals. Having treated farmers’ representatives with open contempt and unable to address the substance of their demands, ministers have instead threatened prosecutions and expanded policing, signalling a strategy of repression rather than negotiation.
Trade unions, youth and local communities have expressed solidarity with the farmers, while anarchist and left-wing groups have actively intervened in support of the mobilisations. The farmers are beginning to break out of isolation and a broader social bloc could be taking shape, capable of undermining the current social peace.
Restructuring the countryside
The farmers’ revolt cannot be understood outside the long-term restructuring of the Greek countryside under EU and domestic policy. Agriculture in Greece has declined sharply as a share of total employment over recent decades. Around the time Greece joined the European Community in 1981, roughly 30% of the labour force worked in agriculture. Today, that figure stands at around 11–12%, reflecting long-term structural shifts in the economy and population.
Successive governments, implementing EU policy, have oriented the Greek economy towards tourism, services and real estate. The country has been reshaped into a low-cost destination for northern and western European capital, while primary production has been hollowed out. Large parts of the rural periphery have been abandoned, with more than a third of the 10 million population living in the Athens metropolitan and wider Attica region.
Under the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), remaining farming communities have been steered away from diverse and resilient cultivation towards monoculture systems reliant on subsidy regimes and fixed pricing. This shift has heightened ecological vulnerability and locked farmers into dependence on incentives and fluctuating markets.
The so-called green transition has further distorted the sector. Farmers are now required to adopt “environmentally friendly” fertilisers and other inputs at significantly higher cost, while fuel and electricity prices continue to rise. At the same time, Greek agricultural products are forced to compete with cheaper imports from outside the EU, frequently produced under far weaker environmental and labour standards but still granted access to European markets.
Against the backdrop of escalating imperialist wars, the EU’s decision to divert resources into rearmament programmes such as ReArm Europe signals a further contraction of support for agricultural production.
The combined effect has been the steady destruction of small-scale farming. Production costs have soared, while climate breakdown has intensified extreme weather events, creating a vicious cycle that is now erupting openly. Floods in recent years have wiped out entire villages along with whole harvests and, in some cases, rendered land unproductive for multiple seasons. Compensation has been slow, partial or entirely absent, pushing many farmers deeper into debt.
At the centre of the current crisis lies the domestic distribution of agricultural subsidies. Networks of intermediaries extract profit from both producers and consumers, while state mechanisms channel public money towards large landowners and agribusiness. In practice, EU subsidies function as a mechanism of class redistribution: a small minority of large landowners and producers absorbs the vast majority of funds, while small and medium farmers remain trapped in a regime of dependency. Fictitious entitlements, weak oversight and clientelist networks ensure that public resources flow upwards.
In Crete, these dynamics are particularly stark. Long-standing patronage networks link political power, land ownership and access to EU incentives. In recent months, violent confrontations between rival family networks—reportedly involving heavy gunfire—have exposed how competition over land and subsidies is mediated through intimidation and force. Far from isolated incidents, these clashes reveal the underlying logic of a system that concentrates power and resources in the hands of a few while abandoning the majority.
A struggle for survival and dignity
The farmers’ revolt is unfolding within a wider cycle of social conflict. In France, farmers blocked part of the A64 highway in December 2025 in protest against livestock culling policies, while earlier in 2024 Spanish and French unions organised tractor blockades at border crossings around the Pyrenees. In Portugal, farmers used tractors to block roads linking to Spain during Europe-wide protests.
At the same time, recent months have seen waves of strikes and confrontations over wages, living costs and public services in Italy, Bulgaria, Spain and Portugal. Across these different contexts, struggles are increasingly turning towards disruptive tactics that target circulation—from port blockades by farmers to actions in solidarity with Gaza aimed at halting weapons shipments and challenging Israeli military tourism—developments that have been met, across cases, with intensified repression.
In Greece, the memory of past uprisings looms large. The debt crisis of the previous decade never truly ended; it reshaped Greek society through austerity, privatisation and mass emigration. The Tempi rail disaster of 2023, which killed 57 people after years of neglect and privatisation of the railway network, remains a stark reminder of the human cost of neoliberal restructuring. Against this backdrop, the ruling class is acutely aware that renewed social explosions are possible.
The farmers’ demands are concrete and rooted in material survival. Alongside full compensation for climate-related disasters, they are calling for reductions in production costs, debt relief, tax reductions, a genuinely public and effective national insurance system, equal rights for land workers, dignified pensions and stable income. These demands cut directly against the core of EU agricultural policy and the interests of agribusiness capital, as they appear incompatible with the dominant neoliberal model of global commerce.
The state’s response—repression, criminalisation and propaganda—aims to isolate the farmers and prevent the emergence of a wider social challenge. Yet the scale and persistence of the mobilisations suggest that something deeper is unfolding. The farmers’ revolt is not a single sector’s dispute, but a struggle over who bears the cost of climate breakdown and capitalist restructuring.
As farmers take to the streets with their tractors, the question confronting Greek society is not only whether agriculture can survive under the existing model, but whether converging struggles can reopen the possibility of a collective rupture with it.
The post Farmers’ revolt in Greece appeared first on Freedom News.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xmckWVPRaI
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