“Smacking the ass of the cows (sic)” was for a long time an obligatory gesture in politics, a sort of Chiraquian rite which demonstrated a supposed proximity to farmers. How easy it was then to claim it at every Agricultural Show. We even made fun of Marine Le Pen who one day became frightened by a bovine that was shaking off flies. Gestures have this in common with words that they wear out over time through being repeated and rehashed. After announcing ten measures aimed at making daily life easier for operators, and the end of the increase in taxation on non-road diesel (GNR), Prime Minister Gabriel Attal promised a “shock of simplification”.
One more, almost five years after that promised by Emmanuel Macron in 2018. “We decided to put agriculture above everything,” added the new tenant of Matignon. This was also the fate promised to Education (“the mother of battles”), the environment (“this five-year term will be ecological or it will not be”), gender equality (“great cause”), etc. . Shocks and emergencies, refrains as old as politics. If everything is a priority, nothing is. If everything is above, what is below?
Performative speech is a view of the mind of the ruler, just like the thousand and one promises of an opposition which does not hesitate to flirt with “yakafokon” if not populism. So environmentalists are urging an end to free trade treaties. All treaties? François Ruffin and Raphaël Glucksmann call for “protectionism”, Franco-French for the first, European for the second. There is a need to regulate the market but French agriculture also lives on its exports. The famous “Ferme France”, long “granary of Europe”, is the sixth agricultural exporter in the world, and the third in Europe. Fewer trade agreements are guaranteed to weaken a colossus with feet of clay: in 2022, France will certainly have exported more than 83 billion worth of agricultural and food products. [données de France Agrimer, publiées le 1er juin 2023] – a record – but the surplus was driven above all by wines, spirits, cereals and dairy products; the meat and fruit and vegetable sectors were in deficit.
Who can a farmer still believe? The National Rally did not miss a beat. Jordan Bardella even sees himself as a “whistleblower […] of what is going on within the European Commission”. The party, like its far-right playing partners in Germany (AfD) and the Netherlands (Party for Freedom), considers itself a receptacle of peasant despair. Who benefits from the anger? “Ours”, replies without hesitation Philippe Olivier, Marine Le Pen’s advisor. At the beginning of December however, when the farmers were already grumbling and turning the village signs upside down, the The same frontist elected officials fought until the end on the immigration law. And there too, the contradictions: at the beginning of December, the same Bardella had all the difficulties in the world to explain an amendment from an RN deputy which facilitated the use of the hand -foreign work in the agricultural sector, a sector in tension if ever there was one. The kind of system demanded by farmers that the RN until then judged as a “suction pump” of immigration. “In politics , an absurdity is not an obstacle”, said Napoleon. But there’s a lot…