The Salon International de l’Agriculture (SIA, or International Agricultural Exhibition) is traditionally held in Paris at the end of February. A major exhibition designed to showcase France’s agricultural expertise and promote it to the public, it’s a not-to-be-missed event for French politicians. This year, Emmanuel Macron made a high-voltage visit. In his discussions with farmers, his obsession with the ‘far Right’ was omnipresent.
Every year, the week-long Salon de l’Agriculture is held just outside Paris. Politicians on both the Right and the Left make a point of visiting, as farmers and rural areas form a considerable electoral segment. What’s more, the concerns of farmers are shared by a majority of French people well beyond farming families.
Emmanuel Macron’s visit was eagerly awaited, but things did not go as smoothly as the head of state would have liked. The discontent of French farmers, which is part of a wider European protest movement, has been going on for several weeks. They are protesting against ever-decreasing incomes and unnecessary challenges by an EU regulatory system that burdens them with unreasonable standards under the guise of ecology. Numerous blockades paralysed the country in the run-up to the Salon de l’Agriculture, and the few promises made by Gabriel Attal’s government did little to ease tensions.
Macron wanted to make the exhibition a great moment of reconciliation and dialogue by organising a debate at the opening of the show. His staff made the mistake of sending an invitation to a militant environmentalist organisation, Soulèvements de la terre (Earth uprising), which is hated by farmers. As a result, the majority of farming unions announced that they were boycotting the debate. The invitation to the environmentalist group was eventually withdrawn, but the damage had been done: the debate had to be cancelled, and the communication opportunity sought by the president turned into a fiasco.
On site, the tension was palpable and clashes broke out between police and demonstrators. Security services were clearly completely overwhelmed, and the images of the presidential visit that were broadcast in the media made a strong impression. It was the first time, as Le Figaro pointed out, that “helmeted police with shields in hand tried to contain angry farmers.” According to the police, the situation was “out of control,” and the president had to open the show more than four hours late—again, a first.
President Macron politicised his visit to the event with a rare intensity, focusing all his communications on the danger of the far Right. He particularly targeted the organisation Coordination Rurale, a farmer union accused of being close to the Rassemblement National (RN), which according to Macron would ‘sabotage’ farming movements with its political demands.
“The Salon has always been politically charged, that’s nothing new. But when you have hundreds of people with flags calling for Frexit, these are not farming movements, that’s factual,” the president said. This statement demonstrates his refusal to see that the difficulty faced by farmers today, as a result of the excesses of the European Union, fundamentally is a political problem. The Rassemblement National, like Reconquête, has the distinction of not denying this suffering and of placing it at the heart of their political programme, whereas the government party would like to downplay it and reduce it to questions of regulatory adjustments and sliding subsidies.
Other political figures took their turn in the aisles at the show, keen to speak to the farming electorate in the run-up to the European elections in June. The Les Républicains party is conducting a seduction operation targeting this electoral segment. The number two on the list led by François-Xavier Bellamy is a woman from the farming world, cereal grower Céline Imart, whose appointment was just made public and who made her first appearance at the exhibition on Monday 26th.
Jordan Bardella, President of the RN and head of the list for the European elections, was at the exhibition for two consecutive days, at the same time as the president and the minister for the economy, Bruno Le Maire. He was able to gauge his popularity with farmers on the spot. Éric Zemmour and Marion Maréchal also met with some success during their visit on Thursday, February 29th, although Maréchal was unfortunate enough to be sprayed with beer at the turn of an aisle—without letting herself be thrown off balance. The videos of their visit provide a striking contrast with the tense sequences that punctuated the visit of President Macron.
Every year, the Salon de l’Agriculture is a rallying point for all lovers of traditional French civilisation. It’s the only time of year when we see so many small hard-working French families on television and in the media, loving their land, passing on their know-how and their taste for simple things done well.
This celebration of the French art de vivre and traditional cuisine based on local produce, which all political figures, Right and Left, are obliged to celebrate, may sometimes appear to be a rather phoney exercise in style, but the issues at stake are profound. The celebration of wine and saucisson, for example, has become a controversial issue in recent years, as it de facto excludes Muslims from the celebration since they cannot partake of either. The first secretary of the socialist party, Olivier Faure, was keen this year to pay tribute to the “sauciflard and the apéro.” A way for him to break with the urban, bourgeois image that has come to cling to his party, this necessary step helped him send out a signal of his ability to remain in tune with the aspirations of the French, who are happy, for the space of a few days, to express their traditional pride in this way.
The show closed its doors on Sunday, March 3rd, having attracted just over 600,000 visitors. The provincials who had flocked en masse to the capital left Paris. The promises of aid evaporated yet again, but the anger is still there.
