France’s farmers unleashed their fury on President Emmanuel Macron on Saturday as he arrived at the annual agricultural fair in Paris, a giant fair long seen as a test of presidents’ relationship with the countryside.
A large crowd that had camped outside the night before stormed in and clashed with police in riot gear, while Mr Macron entered through a side door to meet with unions demanding an end to industry hardship.
During an hour-long closed-door meeting before the exhibition opened, with top cabinet members at Mr Macron’s side, farmers sang the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise”, whistled, raised fists and shouted for the President to resign , as cows and pigs brought to the capital from farms across the country looked on nervously from their pens.
The noisy standoff was the latest in a month-long standoff that has seen farmers block roads around France and Paris – a movement that has spread to other countries including Greece, Poland, Belgium and Germany.
At issue are what farmers say are skyrocketing costs, unfair competition from imports allowed into Europe from other countries that can produce food more cheaply, and especially European Union regulations aimed at limiting or reversing climate change. change.
Agriculture accounts for about 30 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and the European Union says drastic change is needed. Farmers say the European targets impose suffocating administrative and financial burdens.
As Mr Macron emerged from the meeting, his face pale and dejected, he announced that his government would present a bill next month to tackle an “income crisis, a crisis of confidence and a crisis of recognition” for farmers in France . “We must show recognition, respect, pride for the agricultural model and for our farmers,” he said.
It was the latest in a series of attempts, led by the new prime minister, Gabriel Attal, to appease the farmers. But they are almost unanimous in demanding concrete changes rather than promises.
Mr Macron remained at the exhibition, known as the Salon International d’Agriculture, to engage in a lively impromptu discussion with a select group of farmers who were keen to communicate their frustrations directly. Many of them wore yellow, green and red hats to indicate the unions they belonged to.
“Cheap grain imports from Ukraine are destroying French agriculture. What are you going to do about it?’ a farmer demanded, as Mr. Macron, without his jacket and in a white shirt and tie, listened and took notes.
“We’re barely making ends meet!” shouted another. “We don’t have to shut down all the roads in the country to get the relief we need.”
Mr Macron, who has struggled during his nearly seven-year presidency to connect with the poorest and most rural areas of France, where he is seen as remote and remote, urged farmers not to see the situation as “catastrophic”, saying French agriculture is “not collapsing”.
Call for calm. “We will not respond to this agricultural crisis in a few hours,” he said, adding that his government was taking several steps to address deep-rooted problems, including holding negotiations next month at the presidential palace with farmers’ unions, food producers and retailers to make “an agricultural plan for 2040”.
That seems a long way off for farmers and their families struggling to make ends meet.
Mr Macron said an “emergency cash flow plan” would bring banks and the agricultural sector together to help struggling farms and vowed to push for a pan-European solution to another issue: large supermarket chains forming consortiums markets to negotiate food prices, which farmers say deprives them of a fair income. He also announced the establishment of a cost-of-production index that would “serve as a price floor.”
“I stand by our farmers and French agriculture,” Mr Macron insisted.
Ahead of Mr Macron’s visit to the fair, Mr Atal had tried to head off protests by outlining a package of measures aimed at reassuring farmers that agriculture remained a top priority for the government.
“We want to place agriculture among the core interests of the nation in the same way as our defense or our security,” Mr. Attal said.
But those promises didn’t appease the crowds who had descended on the saloon early Saturday morning. The crowd was so dense and noisy that at one point, farmers and policemen seemed to be in danger of being crushed. People tumbled over each other in hay-filled goat enclosures in one part of a huge hall that housed animals.
Visiting the salon has been a political rite of passage for every French president since Jacques Chirac, who was in power from 1995 to 2007, often serving as a barometer of the ability to connect with rural France. Mr Chirac, seen as something of a gentleman farmer, was usually warmly received, while his successor Nicolas Sarkozy lost his temper with a protester he told to “get lost, you poor idiot” – a moment that would haunt him for the rest of his life of his life. presidency.
Early in Mr Macron’s term, he was greeted in the drawing room with an egg thrown near his face, but continued his tour, meeting and greeting farmers in the room.
But the mass clashes with police on Saturday were unlike anything on display in recent memory. They suggest that the peasant movement is unlikely to die out anytime soon.
