Europe’s farmers lost the Mercosur battle. They’re still ahead.

Officially, the EU’s Mercosur trade deal is a defeat for Europe’s farmers. In reality, farm lobbies just can’t stop winning.

EU countries endorsed the bloc’s long-delayed agreement with South American nations on Friday, clearing the way for European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to fly to Paraguay later this week and close a deal that has haunted Brussels for more than two decades.

The agreement is going through despite tractor protests, border blockades and fierce opposition from farm groups and capitals including Paris and Warsaw.

But the price of getting Mercosur over the line was steep.

In the run-up to the endorsement, Brussels quietly stacked the deck in farmers’ favor. Import safeguards were hardened. Controls tightened. And last week, the Commission unveiled a €45 billion budget maneuver allowing governments to shift more money to farmers under the EU’s next long-term budget.

Taken together, the concessions mean Mercosur will enter into force wrapped in protections and paired with a farm budget settlement that leaves the sector stronger than before.

“Other sectors complain,” said one Commission official involved in agricultural policy. “Farmers block roads.” The official, like others in this story, was granted anonymity to speak freely.

The blunt assessment captures a familiar reality inside the EU institutions. Farmers may represent a shrinking share of Europe’s economy, but they remain one of its most powerful political constituencies, capable of reshaping trade deals, budgets and reform agendas even when they fail to block them outright.

Ultimately, to get Mercosur over the line, Brussels had to back away from plans to loosen farmers’ grip on the EU budget and shift money to other priorities.

Pressure that works

The leverage farm leaders wield rests on more than theatrics.

Few officials in Brussels dispute that large parts of the sector are under real strain. Farm incomes are volatile. Costs for fuel, fertilizer and feed have surged. Weather has become harder to predict. Working days are long and isolation is common in hollowing rural communities.

“I understand the anger,” Agriculture Commissioner Christophe Hansen told POLITICO in an interview last month, as Brussels prepared for tractors to roll into the EU quarter.

Christophe Hansen said the Commission had “heard the concerns of farmers” and responded with “strong and unprecedented support measures.” | Photo by Omar Havana/Getty Images

Sympathy for farmers runs high across much of Europe, tied not just to economics but to culture, place and identity. That has always made farm subsidies one of the most politically sensitive lines in the EU budget — and one the Commission knew would be hardest to touch.

That sensitivity was on display again last week, when agriculture ministers traveled to Brussels for a hastily convened meeting outside the formal calendar, called in response to farmer protests only weeks earlier.

Inside, the language was ritualistic. Praise for farmers. Assurances they were being listened to. Repeated references to unprecedented safeguards and financial backing.

Hansen summed it up afterward, saying the Commission had “heard the concerns of farmers” and responded with “strong and unprecedented support measures.”

Reform meets reality

This outcome marks a sharp reversal of earlier ambitions inside the Commission. It’s also a reminder of just how high the stakes are when farm subsidies are in play.

The Common Agricultural Policy remains the single largest line in the EU budget, absorbing roughly a third of total spending and anchoring a political contract that dates back to the bloc’s postwar foundations. Public money, in exchange for food security and rural stability, has long been one of Europe’s core bargains.

That bargain has survived decades of reform. The CAP has been trimmed, greened and made more market-oriented. But its central promise — that farming would be protected — has never disappeared.

After von der Leyen’s re-election in 2024, officials quietly explored loosening how tightly farm spending is locked into the EU budget. Draft ideas for the post-2027 budget would have made farm funds more flexible and easier to redirect to priorities such as defense, climate transition or industrial policy.

It was a technocrat’s answer to a crowded budget.

It did not survive contact with politics.

The proposal landed as farm incomes came under pressure from rising costs, climate volatility and disease outbreaks. Tractors returned to Europe’s streets. Agriculture ministers closed ranks, warning of political fallout in rural heartlands. Farm lobbies mobilized in force.

Hansen spent much of his first year in office traveling to farms and meeting unions, describing agriculture as a strategic asset and warning of a “convergence of pressures” hitting the sector. Behind closed doors, he fought to keep large chunks of farm funding protected.

Tractors park in front of the Arc de Triomphe during a demonstration of the French agricultural union Coordination Rurale (CR) in Paris, France, on January 8, 2026. | Jerome Gilles/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Those efforts didn’t calm farmers’ anger. Instead, pressure became constant, feeding into a series of concessions that steadily narrowed the scope for reform.

First came assurances that most farm spending would remain ring-fenced in the post-2027 budget. Then came a new rural spending target, designed to funnel more money back into countryside projects. Last week, to get the Mercosur deal over the line, the Commission went further, proposing that farmers get early access to up to €45 billion from a broader cash pot the EU would have been saving for a rainy day.

In effect, much of the post-2027 EU farm budget is on track to be sealed at levels approaching today’s, before negotiations have even begun in earnest.

Losing the trade fight, winning the politics

The €45 billion now being front-loaded was originally conceived as crisis insurance.

After the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Brussels concluded that future EU budgets needed more flexibility to respond quickly to shocks. Money reserved for incremental spending reviews was meant to be the first line of defense in the next crisis.

If national capitals embrace the Commission’s proposal, much of that money would be locked in for farmers before the cycle even starts, leaving less for other priority areas.

Mercosur became the perfect vehicle for that pressure. Long championed by industrial exporters, the deal turned into shorthand for everything farmers fear about global competition and loss of control.

The reality is more uneven. Some EU farmers, particularly in high-end food, wine and dairy, stand to gain from better access to Mercosur markets. Others, especially in beef and poultry, face tougher competition. Yet even there, trade analysts have long dismissed fears of South American goods flooding the EU as exaggerated.

But nuance rarely survives a protest banner, and even the unprecedented concessions haven’t stopped farmers from protesting.

The EU’s largest farm lobby, Copa-Cogeca, said Friday that the process of getting the Mercosur deal across the line “erodes trust in European governance, democratic processes and parliamentary scrutiny at a time when institutional credibility is already under strain.”

The group said it would continue mobilizing farmers.

Privately, Commission officials express frustration about the farm lobbies’ hardening demands. 

One said that even though Brussels bends over backwards to meet farmers’ demands, every concession still falls short for farm leaders. Another pointed to Commissioner Hansen’s efforts to engage in direct dialogue with farmers across the EU. “And still, they talk as if we had done nothing,” the official said, referring directly to Copa-Cogeca.

For now, farm leaders are winning. 

Von der Leyen might be boarding that plane to South America.

But when she returns to Brussels, they will already be gearing up for the next fight, confident they can lose the trade battle and still bend Europe’s policy in their favor.