The right “very clearly supports” the farmers’ movement, “including the road blockages” that began this week in the southwest, the leader of the Republican deputies, Olivier Marleix, said on Sunday. “We very clearly support the farmers in their movement, the expression of their anger (…) including the blockages unfortunately when we have to be heard,” he declared on France 3. The farmers’ demonstrations have been increasing in recent weeks, in France as elsewhere in Europe, against financial burdens and environmental standards considered too heavy.
According to Olivier Marleix, it is above all the increase in taxation on non-road diesel (GNR) which “triggers anger” and “the government must immediately renounce this measure”. “The situation of our farmers is no longer tenable,” he said, pointing out the legal risk in the event of misuse of pesticides. “We make farmers into delinquents, so at one point there is a level of frustration,” lamented Olivier Marleix.
A point of disagreement with the president of the LFI deputies, Mathilde Panot, who highlighted on the same channel the need for “ecological standards”. There is, however, a “demand that is shared by everyone, very widely, it is: ‘We want to live from our work'”, she added, recalling that her group had already proposed a “floor price so that farmers can live with dignity”, rejected “by six votes in the National Assembly, because of the Macronists and the LR”.
“Leave them alone”
In the same camp, the national secretary of the Communist Party, Fabien Roussel, called on LCI for “a programming law for our agriculture” in order to remedy the difficulties of a profession which “survives below the poverty line”. Also asking to “maintain” the tax advantage on GNR, because farmers “have no other choice but to use it for their tractors”, he warned that “we will not make the ecological transition against them”.
On the far right, the president of Reconquête!, Eric Zemmour, judged on BFMTV that the “feeling of despair among farmers” is the result of both “the tyranny of the Brussels commission” and an “overtransposition standards” by “the French administration which takes great pleasure in washing whiter than white”.
Already the day before, the number one of the National Rally, Jordan Bardella, had denounced from the wine-growing Gironde “Macron’s Europe which wants the death of our agriculture”. Agricultural anger and heavy opposition fire, less than five months before the European elections, are pushing the government to react. “No, our farmers are not bandits, polluters, people who torture animals, as we sometimes hear,” said Prime Minister Gabriel Attal on Saturday, who will receive the FNSEA and Jeunes unions in Matignon on Monday. farmers.
His Minister of Gender Equality, Aurore Bergé, also played appeasement on Sunday. “The farmers, we must leave them alone,” she declared on France Inter. It’s not a question of “letting them do everything”, but “we have the healthiest and most sustainable agriculture in the world” and “permanently adding constraints (…) is not necessarily a good decision.”