He arrived with a confident look. This Friday, January 26, it is almost 5 p.m. when Gabriel Attal sets foot in Montastruc-de-Salies, a small village in Haute-Garonne, in Occitanie. The Prime Minister is aware that he is making his real debut at Matignon, but does not show any nervousness in front of the farmers who challenge him.
Appointed seventeen days ago as head of government, the thirty-year-old, renowned for his oratorical art and his ability to go through sleepless nights, must soothe peasant unease in a few hours: a deep, diffuse, almost existential crisis. , born a week earlier, about fifty kilometers away, on the A64 motorway, in Carbonne.
In a few days, the revolt movement – marked by the deaths of a farmer and her daughter on Tuesday, after being hit by a car at a roadblock in Ariège – has spread across the entire territory. . The tractors are now at the gates of Paris, ready to dump manure on the buildings of the capital to bear witness to the exasperation that has been brewing in the countryside for so many years.
Standards, mistrust, over-indebtedness, Europe… In the absence of Emmanuel Macron, visiting India, Gabriel Attal must provide solutions which will, in a flash, remove road blockages and convince farmers that the State considers them. Otherwise, the crisis will bog down and overshadow his general policy speech, scheduled for Tuesday January 30 before the deputies. Its teams hope for a standing Hemicycle, to applaud the youngest prime minister in the history of the Ve Republic. Gabriel Attal is 34 years old.
Gaspard Gantzer: “The agricultural crisis is the big leagues”
“We’re going to be there,” assures the Prime Minister, from Montastruc-de-Salies, addressing Jérôme Bayle. The cattle breeder, whose farmer father ended his life, has become the figure of this crisis launched by the rank and file and not the unions. The apparent assurance of the tenant of Matignon must show that he entered fully and “serenely” in the costume of the majority leader, explains those around him. “Crises are inherent to the office of prime minister. »
The repeated controversies surrounding the Minister of Education, Youth and Sports, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, have become almost secondary. “The agricultural crisis is the big leagues”, observes Gaspard Gantzer, François Hollande’s former communicator. Will the young Prime Minister emerge from this episode strengthened or discredited and weakened from his first steps at Matignon?
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