Rabid farmers’ protests in France stir memories of “yellow vests” The police strike in Paris raises the question: how safe will the Summer Olympics be?

For now they only show the muscles. Since Friday, French farmers in the vicinity of the southern French Pyrenees metropolis of Toulouse have been closing several national roads and highways, such as the supra-regional A64. A total of 450 tractors arrived. Drivers prepare for longer blockages at roundabouts and toll gates; They carry sausages, beer and even portable toilets.

All this seems like a foretaste of the national yellow vest protests (“Gilets jaunes”) five years ago. The mostly poorly paid rural workers had caused President Emmanuel Macron a first, very violent social crisis.

And if the French farmers go to the barricades, politicians in Paris and Brussels must also buckle up. In the largest agricultural country in the EU with a usable area of ​​more than 27 million hectares, farmers have a very effective lobby. By comparison, Switzerland has 1 million hectares of agricultural land.

The anger increases

And once the French farmers have woken up, they start working like the yellow vests. At the end of last year they emptied cheap wine from Spain from the hijacked tankers onto the asphalt. In December they occupied government offices in the Brittany capital Rennes. And in many villages they have hung signs upside down. They want to show that agricultural policy is ‘turned upside down’, as the chairman of the powerful farmers’ association FNSEA, Arnaud Rousseau, explained.

On Friday, representatives of the radical wine collective CAV detonated an explosive at the office of the environmental authority Dreal in Carcassonne. In doing so, they expressed their anger about increasing environmental regulations, for example regarding the use of pesticides and other chemicals.

French farmers are also calling for measures similar to those of their German counterparts to combat inflation and the simultaneous decline in incomes. In concrete terms, they want permanent subsidies for agricultural diesel and lower taxes on the purchase of water.

The government in Paris received a delegation from the farmers’ association FNSEA on Monday. But the farmers did not expect much and announced that they would expand their protests to “the whole of France”.

Long-distance political duel

This weekend, the movement that has only just begun has already been politically codified. President Macron sent his new Prime Minister Gabriel Attal to the front to show his understanding for the farmers’ concerns. In the village of Saint-Laurent d’Agny in the Rhone Valley, Attal spoke to 150 residents. But he only came with a promise to reduce government standards and paperwork for farmers.

In the Bordeaux wine region, the head of the right-wing populist ‘Rassemblement National’, Jordan Bardella, appeared in the village of Queyrac. He denounced the EU’s agricultural policies, which were strangling France’s farming population. Bardella, who led right-wing populist Marine Le Pen in June’s European elections, ignored the fact that the country receives 9.4 billion euros in subsidies from Brussels, more than any other EU country.

His parallel performance alongside Attal seemed like a long-distance duel before the European elections. The farmers’ protests put Macron on the defensive more than ever.

Farmers often contradict themselves when they challenge environmental regulations from Paris and Brussels, even though they too suffer directly from droughts and other climate effects. But Macron knows how ruthlessly the French peasants have used pitchforks against the central authority since the Jacqueries in the Middle Ages – then against the king, today with yellow fluorescent vests against the head of state.