Comment by myrmidon
2 hours ago
If your position is that farmers in the EU or Italy specifically have no lobby then you could not be more wrong.
Throwing money at farmers to keep them in the country is, like, the main purpose of the thing, and more than a quarter of the budget is spent on it (this is not a recent development, either).
> the main purpose of the thing
It is not. But France was very good at ring-fencing their interests very early on, resulting in a somewhat-outsized weight of agricultural policy over the Union budget (since it was, back then, almost non-existent in other areas). After the Eastern expansion, it has become very difficult to change the approach (which is, overall, fundamentally successful - yes, there are issues, but nothing is perfect). Pre-brexit, the UK government would be the only one willing to grandstand on reforming the policy, mostly for reasons of internal propaganda; now it's basically in no-one's interest to touch it.