The scene is talkative. This Monday, January 22, after 10 p.m., François Ruffin rushes to the BFMTV set. It’s rare to see a top politician on the 24/7 news channel at such a late hour, but French farmers are grumbling across the country. A new crisis, and the left has been silent on the subject in recent days. And where there is emptiness, François Ruffin slips in. Occupy the ground, talk to people as he likes to do and show. The matter is not easy: farmers do not vote LFI, nor PS and even less EELV. They never did. This is an electorate that has never really interested the left as it is historically anchored to the right and, since 2017, has turned to Emmanuel Macron or Marine Le Pen. Farmers, unlike those who made up the yellow vest movement, are not “invisibles”, according to the established expression. We see them in villages and around towns, and even a little further than the metropolises, but is that already too far for the left?
Business leaders – their farms – and still often imbued with the Catholic faith, an aging population too, farmers have little interest in the societal questions of the time which so often occupy debates on the left; and loathe the figures of these new battles. It’s Aymeric Caron and his battle for animal welfare or even Sandrine Rousseau and her face-to-face with Fabien Roussel on meat which they consider to be a challenge to their identity. Do you have to have had your hands in the ground to be a legitimate defender of peasants? It’s not good to be an environmentalist, in any case. No matter that Jacques Chirac, “the friend of farmers”, gave all powers to mass distribution with his 1986 ordinance relating to freedom of prices and competition, the “ecologist” appears to be the one and only opponent. Forgotten the agronomist René Dumont or José Bové!
“Bandits”
The MEP Benoît Biteau, a farmer, and the MEP Marie Pochon, daughter of a wine grower, may shout, but nothing helps. Prime Minister Gabriel Attal understood this well by pushing this wedge, cleverly supported by the right, on January 23 in the National Assembly. He denounced “the crocodile tears” of environmentalists who would judge farmers “as bandits, as polluters of our land, as torturers of their animals”. Between farmers and ecologists, a repulsion, insensitivity at best. Environmentalists find the accusation ungrateful but during the last Nupes negotiations for the 2022 legislative elections, EELV especially demanded constituencies in the large French metropolises, where they achieve their best scores. The city rather than the countryside.
The time when Jean Jaurès affirmed, on the occasion of his profession of socialist faith in Carmaux (Tarn), that peasants were “the most unfortunate of workers” seems well and truly over on the left. “The left does not appear economically credible and is suspected of wanting to put in place social and environmental protection measures that are too restrictive in their eyes,” wrote sociologists Bertrand Hervieu and François Purseigle in 2012 in “The agricultural world: a fragmented minority, anchored to the right” (Cevipof). And yet, at first glance, this umpteenth anger of French peasants has everything to have an echo on the left: crisis of purchasing power, ever lower incomes, demand for market regulation, the rejection of free trade agreements. unfair exchange, etc.
Landmarks
“The paradox is that the left in power has shown its credibility on agricultural issues. Unfortunately as soon as it returns to the opposition, it tells itself that it will never win on this subject so it leaves it fallow and concentrates on its fundamentals”, laments Rémi Branco, socialist vice-president of the Lot departmental council and author for the Jean-Jaurès Foundation, of the work “Far from the cities, far from the heart: does the left want to return to the countryside ?” (L’Aube) to be published in February. “The farmers have the impression that the left is disproportionately focused on their case, continues the same Branco. For them the left equals environmentalists who would multiply the standards and only make accusations of pollution, poisoning… We must get rid of of this and work towards a discourse which not only defends but concretely supports farmers in the face of the immense challenges which face them and which concern us all.” Vast program.
To tell the truth, the old pink house has never shone with major projects on the agricultural question, and the peasants themselves have never had socialist benchmarks. In this desert, only Stéphane Le Foll seems to have survived. In 2012, as François Hollande’s victory loomed, Le Foll redoubled his efforts to simmer a socialist agricultural policy for the future president who was simmering his future government. And in the first version of the government team, it is Jean-Michel Baylet who holds the rope to occupy the chair at 78 rue de Varenne. It will take the intervention of Jean-Marc Ayrault, Jean-Yves Le Drian and François Rebsamen to bring Hollande to his senses. Le Foll remains a minister appreciated by the profession, even if he was pushed around several times until he was woken up at his home by angry farmers.
Revolution
“What is being criticized today by the farmers has never been decided by the socialists,” reframes Boris Vallaud, boss of the PS deputies and elected from a rural constituency in the Landes. “We can clearly see that neoliberalism has killed agriculture,” he adds. “The Common Agricultural Policy is only an ecological accommodation and not the ambitious change of a model that is running out of steam. It is a structural reflection to leading, it doesn’t happen with a snap of the fingers but it is built with the farmers, by supporting them.” The words are there, the observation too, but nothing helps… The PS tries as best it can to get out of the game, in vain.
Out of sight out of mind. Only France is rebellious in not attempting the impossible. Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s movement knows that it will never be unanimous among farmers, even if it can count on the support of the Confédération paysanne – a minority union which initially refrained from supporting farmers in anger – and a few faces from the inside among its deputies: Mathilde Hignet, agricultural worker, and Manon Meunier, agricultural engineer. Last November, LFI took up a demand from farmers in a proposed law aimed at regulating distributor margins and establishing floor prices for farmers, to no avail.
In recent days, as the operations of angry peasants increased and the situation worsened, the rebels saw the opportunity for a convergence of struggles. The idea of sending LFI activists, without leaflets or banners, to swell the ranks and blockade points, as in the days of the yellow vests, is even being considered internally. “The time is therefore right to make common cause with the farmers’ movement and build citizen convergence,” calls Jean-Luc Mélenchon on his blog. Every crisis has its strategic interest in the eyes of the rebellious leader. The eternal myth of the revolution which, it seems, cannot take long.
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