Tragedy chased away communication. “Our Nation is upset and united”: these condolences are the first that Gabriel Attal has addressed as Prime Minister, after the death, Tuesday morning at dawn, of a farmer on a dam in Ariège. The occupants of the vehicle which mowed down the family were targeted by an OQTF, revealed The Parisian, which will not calm the climate. While the government is already haunted by the precedent of the Yellow Vests, this death only amplifies the parallel. On November 17, 2018, during the first weekend of mobilization, a woman was hit by a motorist trying to force a roadblock in Savoie.
Emmanuel Macron, through two tweets, was forced to intervene, before flying to India in the second half of the week. Death necessarily modifies the facts of a crisis that the executive struggles not only to curb, but also to understand. He uses his social media monitoring tools and multiplies the feedback from the field. A newly appointed prefect in a department in the southwest concedes, after a meeting with agricultural representatives: “They scared me.” The nebulous demands of a movement sometimes lacking representatives, which is also developing on the fringes of trade union organizations, are worrying. “Even the FNSEA is overwhelmed,” notes an advisor.
Until now, Gabriel Attal has been juggling files since his appointment, to occupy the field while waiting for his general policy speech. “School will be an absolute priority,” he said one day during a visit to a school in Yvelines. ? The next day, in Dijon, he affirmed that “the hospital is obviously at the top of the pile”. A few days later, in the Rhône, he insisted: “My first priority will be to continue to support working France.” Words, formulas to save time, but the calendar is turned upside down. Agriculture is “a sector that [le Premier ministre] knows relatively little”, remarked Arnaud Rousseau, the president of the FNSEA, as he left his meeting at Matignon on Monday evening.
Faced with his first big obstacle, Gabriel Attal therefore multiplies the consultations. Then he chose to respond with the weapons of politics during current questions to the government. “Sometimes your tears look like crocodile tears,” says the head of government who behaves above all like leader of the majority, before denouncing “those who stumble from anger to anger”. The European election campaign has already started: everyone, from Laurent Wauquiez to Stéphane Travers, speaks in their own way of “farm France”.
This is a survey that the executive had looked closely at. The image barometer of farmers, carried out in October by Ifop to West France, recalls the enormous feeling of sympathy of the French towards farmers: more than half of them think that they should be supported more (56%). 85% consider that they play a major role in the diet of the French, 75% trust them. The “returned panels” were a success that struck people’s minds. “Farmers are one of the professions that are loved, they must be taken seriously, warns an advisor. In addition, it is a very visual movement.” Images that stand out, slogans that focus on French fractures as well as the identity of the country, and now a death: faced with emotion, those in power are still looking for a way out of the crisis.