French farmers vow to keep up protests despite Attal’s concessions

French farmers have vowed to blockade Paris and keep up national protests despite Prime Minister Gabriel Attal offering concessions such as the scrapping of an unpopular diesel tax increase. 

“We have made the decision to keep up the movement,” Arnaud Rousseau, the head of the FNSEA, France’s largest farmers union, told the TF1 news channel. He added that the prime minister had not done enough to calm the anger of farmers. “The government must go further,” he said.

The protests in France, the biggest agricultural producer in the EU and a leading recipient of the bloc’s Common Agricultural Policy subsidies, have blocked motorways and targeted government buildings. They follow similar protests in Germany, Italy, Poland and Romania in recent weeks.

Farmers have expressed anger over falling incomes, higher costs and stringent regulations, including the EU’s “farm to fork” strategy, which aims to reduce pesticide use and impose new rules which take climate change and biodiversity into account in farming practices. 

The week-old protests in France attracted more than 70,000 people by Friday, according to unions, with thousands of tractors forming long convoys and snarling traffic on highways from Toulouse to Lille.

It is the first big test for Attal, who at 34 became the country’s youngest prime minister earlier this month, after a tumultuous stretch marked by parliamentary battles over immigration and pensions reforms. A loyalist selected by President Emmanuel Macron for his media savvy and skill in countering political opponents, Attal is now seeking to defuse the farmers’ uprising despite having little experience with rural issues.

Farmers enjoy widespread popularity in France, with polls showing 89 per cent of the public back their protest. The far-right, led by Marine Le Pen, has been trying to tap into the farmers’ anger ahead of European parliamentary elections in June. 

On Friday, Attal visited a farm in Montastruc-de-Salies, south-western France, to announce policy changes including faster payment of emergency funds, removing red tape and cracking down on food companies and retailers that do not respect laws on fairly negotiating the prices paid to farmers.

Wearing a black suit and tie with his speech notes on a bale of hay, Attal vowed to “put agriculture above all else” and added: “Without our farmers, we aren’t France any longer, and we aren’t a country.”

Attal also repeated Macron’s earlier opposition to the Mercosur trade agreement being negotiated between the EU and countries in South America, which farmers say would lead to unfair competition because producers there are not held to the same environmental standards or pesticide bans.

Paris also signalled that more would be done for farmers, with agriculture minister Marc Fesneau telling broadcaster France Info that “there would be further measures taken”, such as supporting winemakers. During another farm visit on Sunday, Attal said that “additional” measures were being considered to shield French farmers from imports, although he did not provide specifics.

Unions are now gearing up for further action in the coming days. Pierrick Horel, the leader of the Young Farmers union, said farmers were preparing a larger blockade of the capital.  

“We need to make Parisians understand they need farmers to live, and that the capital is not self-sufficient, something the prime minister seems to have forgotten,” said Horel on BFMTV.

Although the police have so far taken a hands-off approach to allow the farmers to protest, interior minister Gérald Darmanin signalled on Sunday that they would take a harder line to prevent disruption to Paris. He said 15,000 officers would be deployed on Monday to prevent farmers from blocking access to area airports and stop tractors from entering the city.

On Sunday night, armoured vehicles and police vans were dispatched to the Rungis food market in the outskirts of Paris — the main supplier of the capital’s restaurants and supermarkets — in a bid to prevent farmers from blockading it.