German farmers blocked city centres, highways and motorway slip roads with tractors at the start of a week-long, nationwide protest over planned cuts to agricultural sector subsidies that the government said could be co-opted by rightwing extremists.

“We are exercising our basic right to inform society and the political class that Germany needs a competitive agricultural sector,” the president of the German farmers’ association, Joachim Rukwied, told Stern magazine on Monday.

In Dresden, the state capital of Saxony, figures from the ranks of the Free Saxons, a small rightwing extremist party founded in 2021, spoke at a rally outside the Semperoper opera house, the broadcaster MDR reported.

The Third Way, a neo-Nazi party formed by former members of the extremist NPD in 2013, also called for its supporters to protest with the farmers, while delegates from the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) reportedly joined a rally in Stuttgart.

The unpopular three-party coalition headed by the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, infuriated farmers last month by announcing the subsidy cuts, part of an emergency package to find billions of euros in savings after the constitutional court ruled the 2024 budget was illegal.

Farmers and hauliers have been the first groups to protest in what could become an unprecedented wave of cross-sector industrial action as Germany’s economy, long the powerhouse of Europe, struggles with a damaging combination of short-term and structural problems.

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