Barricaded Highways and a Deadly Incident as
French Farmers Rise Up
The far right is intent on exploiting the spread of
anger across Europe in an agricultural sector that feels alienated.
Roger Cohen
By Roger
Cohen
Reporting
from Paris
Jan. 23,
2024, 2:09 p.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/23/world/europe/france-farmers-barricades-protests.html
A car
plowed into a barrier set up by protesting French farmers early on Tuesday,
killing one woman and injuring her husband and daughter, as France faced
growing rural fury at perceived overregulation and increased diesel fuel
prices.
The new
government headed by Gabriel Attal, the 34-year-old prime minister, faced its
first crisis with barricades spreading across highways throughout the southwest
of the country. The protests mirrored similar demonstrations in Germany, driven
by a sense of marginalization among farmers that the extreme right has been
quick to exploit.
“This is
the France of the forgotten,” Jordan Bardella, the president of the
anti-immigrant National Rally party, said during a visit to the Bordeaux region
on Saturday. “The fight for agriculture is also the fight against rural
effacement, the cry of a French people who do not want to die.”
Rural
discontent has also contributed to a surge in support for the far-right
Alternative for Germany party, known as AfD, and the Dutch Party for Freedom,
led by Geert Wilders. A political, economic and cultural abyss between the
populations of major cities and what the French call “the periphery” has been a
factor in the rise of anti-establishment, nationalist movements from the United
States to Western Europe.
At one of
the French barriers, in the southwestern Ariège region, a car carrying three
foreigners hurtled through a wall of packed straw and into a family of cattle
farmers from the village of Saint-Félix-de-Tournegat, according to local
authorities. A woman died instantly. Her husband and teenage daughter are in
critical condition, the Ariège prefecture said.
“The nation
is in shock and expresses its solidarity,” Mr. Attal said in a statement.
The public
prosecutor’s office in Foix, a city near the accident site, said that three
Armenians in the car had been remanded in custody as part of a manslaughter
investigation but that “the facts do not appear to support the theory of an
intentional act.”
The
incident, whatever its nature, raised tensions in the standoff between the
government and farmers enraged by a proposal to eliminate a tax break on the
diesel fuel used in tractors, which is generally delivered to farms in large
tanks. A proposed increase in diesel prices for cars sparked the Yellow Vest
protest movement in 2018 that led to violent clashes in Paris and brought wide
areas of France to a standstill.
“We are
going to stay here as long as the government does not announce some strong
measures, and, if necessary, we will go and block Paris,” Cédric Baron, a
farmer manning a barrier near Carbonne, south of Toulouse, told Le Monde, a
daily newspaper.
Farmers are
also angry over the proliferation of what they see as suffocating “norms”
issuing from the European Union and the French government. These rules have
become so all-encompassing that, in the words of Emmanuelle Ducros, writing in
L’Opinion, a daily newspaper, “Being a farmer in France amounts to reading
Kafka on a tractor.”
The
regulations are so pervasive that almost none of the more than 66 million acres
of agricultural land in France are unaffected. They address pesticides,
fertilizers, protection of birds, preservation of wetlands, the obligation to
leave 4 percent of land fallow, mandatory replanting of fields after harvests —
all this and much more, governed under an increasingly complex system of zoning
that means farms are cut into segments with differing rules.
Farmers see
many of the regulations as reflecting the obsession with environmental issues
of “elite” city dwellers and civil servants at the European Union headquarters
in Brussels, coupled with ignorance of the practical hardships faced by rural
workers more focused on making it to the end of the month than the goal of a
carbon-free economy.
Faced with
mounting fury, Marc Fesneau, the French agriculture minister, announced on
Tuesday that a proposed new law governing the farming sector would be delayed
for “a few weeks” to respond to the demand for “a simplification.” Mr. Attal,
the prime minister, has been meeting with the main farmers’ unions in an
attempt to defuse the crisis.
With
European Parliament elections approaching in June, the National Rally has cast
the European Union as “the enemy of the people,” as Mr. Bardella has described
it, while portraying itself as the representative of “real people” — as opposed
to urban elites.
The AfD has
done much the same in Germany, which is facing widespread street protests
provoked in part by a decision to phase out agricultural diesel fuel subsidies.
On Jan. 15, thousands of farmers gathered around Brandenburg Gate in Berlin,
with some demanding the government step down, even though a proposed tax on
farm vehicles had been withdrawn.
Christian
Lindner, the German finance minister, told the crowd that he would not make any
more concessions. Although the head of the farmers’ association announced more
protests if the federal government did not change its budget plans, the
subsequent protests have been overshadowed by massive protests against the AfD.
President
Macron appointed Mr. Attal this month as the head of a center-right government
in part to head off the far-right National Rally; its longtime leader, Marine
le Pen; and the charm offensive of her youthful lieutenant, Mr. Bardella. That
the task will be arduous is already evident.
Christopher
F. Schuetze in Berlin and Aurelien Breeden in Paris contributed reporting.
Roger Cohen
is the Paris bureau chief for The Times, covering France and beyond, including
Ukraine, Russia, India, the Central African Republic and Israel. He has been a
journalist for more than four decades. More about Roger
Cohen
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