Farmers drove their tractors into central Paris on Friday, February 23, to raise the pressure on President Emmanuel Macron, who has promised them a meeting at France's coming agriculture show, a key annual event for farmers, the public and politicians, to discuss their grievances. France's biggest farming union FNSEA acknowledged that this year's Salon de l'Agriculture, which opens on Saturday, would be "eminently political" but said it would hopefully also be a "time of celebration."
Around 30 tractors entered central Paris heading for Les Invalides, the military museum and esplanade a stone's throw from the Assemblée Nationale and just across the river from the Elysée presidential palace. A second convoy was expected to enter the capital later Friday.
Farmers' complaints include what they call burdensome environmental rules and the threat of cheap imports from outside the European Union, and they also demand measures to address the fact that many of them still suffer from earning too little income.
Prime Minister Gabriel Attal failed to placate them with a host of measures announced Wednesday, promising to elevate agriculture "to the status of a fundamental national interest" and outlining an agriculture bill designed to address farmers' grievances. But farmers have continued to block motorways and roundabouts, set fire to tires and lay siege to supermarkets, saying they needed more. All sights are now on Macron, who is scheduled to visit the Salon de l'Agriculture, as is customary for presidents, on Saturday.
On Thursday, Macron said he would hold a debate there involving "all actors in the agriculture world" to "outline the future" of the sector. But the initiative came off to a rocky start when he included the radical ecology group "Soulèvements de la Terre" (The Earth Uprisings Collective), which Macron's own interior minister recently tried to have banned on the grounds they were "eco-terrorists". After protests from farming unions, opposition politicians and even from within the government's ranks, the group was quickly uninvited and Macron's office said there had been "an error".
But the damage was done, with the head FNSEA, Arnaud Rousseau, calling Macron's initiative "cynical" and saying he would not be part of "something that doesn't allow dialogue in good conditions". Even without the activists, Saturday's debate promised to be "red-blooded", predicted agriculture fair president Jean-Luc Poulain. Macron's office said he was hoping for a debate that would be "without taboo, in a republican spirit but without filters".