The anger of French farmers and other European countries was evident on the first day of Emmanuel Macron’s state visit to Sweden, this Tuesday, January 30, largely devoted to the future of European defense and support for Ukraine. The President of the Republic insisted on defending the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), in the face of the difficulties of French farmers, but asked for “rules” to face non-European competition. “It would be easy to blame everything on Europe,” he said during a press conference with Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, noting that “without a Common Agricultural Policy, our farmers would have no income and would not be able to live for many of them.”
The French head of state also justified the refusal to conclude a trade agreement between the European Union and the Latin American countries of Mercosur, desired by countries like Germany, by the existence of “rules which do not are not homogeneous with ours. Emmanuel Macron also asked for “clear measures” regarding imports of chicken and cereals from Ukraine. He is due to meet on Thursday February 1 with the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen on the sidelines of a European summit.
The president, who spoke shortly before Prime Minister Gabriel Attal’s general policy speech, also hoped that distributors “do not extract all the added value” in negotiations with farmers. The European purchasing centers set up by certain distributors to obtain even lower prices constitute a “circumvention of French law”, which he wants to discuss at the European level, he added.
The movement of anger is in any case spreading across the continent: after demonstrations in Germany, Poland, Romania, Belgium and Italy in recent weeks, the three main Spanish agricultural unions have announced “mobilizations” in the throughout the country over the “coming weeks”. More than a week after the first blockade of roads in Occitanie, which launched the movement on January 26, farmers continue to disrupt traffic almost everywhere in France, after sometimes spending the night in their tractor.