French farmers expressed their anger on Saturday as President Emmanuel Macron arrived at the annual agricultural fair in Paris. The fair has long been a major test of the president's relationship with the countryside.
A large crowd that had camped outside the night before stormed in and fought with police officers in riot gear, while President Macron entered through a side door to meet with unions demanding an end to the industry's hardships.
In an hour-long closed-door meeting before the opening of the fair, with ministers flanking Prime Minister Macron, farmers sang the French national anthem 'La Marseillaise' at the top of their voices, whistled, raised their fists, and shouted hurray. As the president resigned, timid cows and pigs brought to the capital from farms across the country looked anxious in their display pens.
The raucous confrontation was the latest in a month-long confrontation that has seen farmers block roads around France and Paris, a movement that has spread to other countries including Greece, Poland, Belgium and Germany.
The problems are what farmers say are sharply rising costs, unfair competition from imports into Europe from other countries that can produce food more cheaply, and especially European Union regulations aimed at curbing or reversing climate change.
Agriculture accounts for about 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and the European Union says radical change is needed. Farmers say European targets are adding to their administrative and financial burden.
When President Macron emerged from the meeting looking pale and haggard, he announced that his government would submit legislation next month to address the “income crisis, the trust crisis and the perception crisis” of French farmers. “We need to show recognition, respect and pride in our agricultural model and our farmers,” he said.
It was the latest in a series of attempts by new Prime Minister Gabriel Attal to appease farmers. But they were almost unanimous in calling for specific changes rather than promises.
Mr Macron remained at the fair, known as the Salon International d'Agriculture, where he engaged in impassioned impromptu discussions with a select group of farmers seeking to air their grievances directly. Many of them wore yellow, green and red hats to symbolize the union they belonged to.
“Cheap grain imports from Ukraine are destroying French agriculture. What are you going to do about it?” One farmer took off his suit jacket and put on a white shirt and tie, listening and taking notes as Mr. Macron asked.
“We can barely make ends meet!” another person shouted. “We don’t need to block every road in the country to get the relief we need.”
Macron, who has struggled during his nearly seven years in office to connect with poorer, rural parts of France that he sees as remote and aloof, urged farmers not to see the situation as “catastrophic.” Agriculture “has not collapsed.”
He called for calm. “We will not respond to this agricultural crisis in a few hours,” he said, adding that the government was taking a variety of steps to resolve the deep-rooted problem, including holding negotiations with farmer unions, food manufacturers and retailers at the Blue House next month. We will establish an agricultural plan for 2040.
For farmers and their families struggling to make it to the end of the month, it still seems like a long way off.
President Macron said the “emergency cash flow plan” would bring together banks and the agricultural sector to help struggling farms and pushed for a Europe-wide solution to another problem: large supermarket chains negotiating by forming a purchasing consortium. I promised I would. Food prices, farmers say, deprive them of a fair income. He also announced that he would create a production cost index that “serves as a floor price.”
“I stand with our farmers and French agriculture,” Macron insisted.
Before Mr. Macron visited the fair, Mr. Attal sought to deflect protests by outlining a series of measures to convince farmers that agriculture is the government's top priority.
“We want to place agriculture as one of the basic interests of the country, just like defense and security,” Mr. Attal said.
But those promises did not appease the crowds that flocked to the salon early Saturday morning. The crowd was so dense and noisy that at any moment it seemed like the farmers and police were in danger of being trampled. People fell over each other into a goat pen filled with hay in one part of the large hall where livestock were kept.
Visits to the Salon have been a political rite of passage for every French president since Jacques Chirac, who served from 1995 to 2007, and often serve as a gauge of his ability to connect with rural France. Mr. Chirac, seen as a gentleman farmer, usually received a warm welcome, but his successor, Nicolas Sarkozy, lost his cool with a protester who called him “lost, poor fool.” command.
In the early days of his administration, President Macron was greeted with eggs thrown close to his face at a hair salon, but he continued to make rounds and meet and greet farmers in halls.
But last Saturday's massive clash with police was like nothing at the fair in recent memory. They suggest that the peasant movement is not going away anytime soon.