Jordan Bardella likes to criticize Emmanuel Macron for "saying everything and the opposite of everything." But as he visited the Paris Agricultural Show on Monday, February 26, the chair of the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party himself defended the exact opposite of a proposal his party has championed for over a decade: The establishment of "minimum prices" on agricultural products, to protect farmers' incomes.

"If you implement minimum prices at the French level, it's a poverty trap because, precisely, people will go and buy on the European market," said Bardella, speaking on radio France Bleu and later again to reporters. 'And if you implement minimum prices at the European level in a totally unrealistic way, people will go and buy on the international markets." With this statement, Bardella did not just oppose Macron, who has been promoting this measure since February 24 in a bid to redress the power imbalance that agro-industrial and supermarket companies have imposed on farmers. The 28-year-old MEP was imposing a major about-face on his party's policy platform, and on its leader, Marine Le Pen.

During her past three presidential election campaigns, Le Pen has consistently taken up the idea of minimum prices, which had previously been championed by part of the left. "Minimum prices will be introduced to enable farmers to earn a dignified living from their work," she promised in 2022. Previously she had said that "the state will set guaranteed minimum prices" (in 2017) and that "minimum prices guaranteed to our farmers by the state" (2012).

Bardella still seemed to share her position as recently as Sunday. "When it came to voting for price minimums in the Assemblée Nationale, there was only one unfortunate thing, and that was that Emmanuel Macron's majority opposed it," he said on the set of news channel BFM-TV, referring to a bill proposed by La France Insoumise (LFI, radical left) on November 30, 2023, and which was voted for by all the RN lawmakers present at the time (47 out of 88).

Was Bardella's U-turn the next day influenced by his morning meeting with the president of the Young Farmers (JA) union, Arnaud Gaillot, who has long been hostile to this concept? It would be an understatement to say that Bardella's policy reversal came as a surprise to his party's members, stunning even those who were present alongside him at the Paris Agricultural Show. "In spirit, yes, we're in favor of a national minimum price, in fact we voted for it [on November 30]," said Edwige Diaz, an RN lawmaker, right as her boss was saying the opposite. "We're consistent and very comfortable with our votes, as we vote without sectarianism," she said.

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