It looked like a military campaign. The farmers called it “Operation Paris Siege,” while the French interior minister ordered an “important defensive system” to protect the capital and its airports.
On Monday, angry agriculturalists and their allies deployed their tractors in an attempt to surround Paris, choking major roadways and disrupting not only traffic and trade, but also politics and normal life.
Farmers are emerging as the protest movement of the moment. In multiple countries across Europe, they have been driving their combines and harvesters into the streets to oppose cuts to subsidies and new regulations, some of them designed to reduce climate-changing emissions.
France, of course, is deeply familiar with protests. But as Paris prepares to host the Olympics this summer, and as the country’s ruling political centrists gird for a challenge from the far right in European Parliament elections, the farmer protests have the potential to be particularly destabilizing.
And the French farmers don’t seem in the mood to be appeased. They went forward with their protest Monday even after the government backed down on a plan to decrease farmers’ diesel discount.
France’s real-time traffic alerts provider, Sytadin, ticked off the highway closures: A1, A4, A5, A6, A10, A13, A15, A16.
French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin announced the mobilization of 15,000 police officers. He vowed to keep open the capital’s two major international airports — De Gaulle and Orly — and to protect one of the continent’s largest wholesale food sellers, the International Market in Rungis.
Despite the martial rhetoric, there were no reports of violence several hours into Monday’s blockade. A few tires and some hay bales were burned. Mostly, the farmers shut down their tractors and played cards.
What to do about the farmers is now a hot political topic in European capitals — as their revolts and rhetoric are being adopted and amplified by populist politicians, some from the far right.
In recent months, farmers have launched similar protests in Belgium, Germany, Poland, Romania and the Netherlands. On Monday, in support of the Paris siege, agricultural workers shut down a major road outside Brussels and access to the port in Hamburg.
In Berlin two weeks ago, farmers in their tractors from across Germany massed in the city center near the Brandenburg Gate, blocking access to parliament. They were enraged over the government’s plan to phase out agricultural fuel subsidies.
The protesters in Berlin waved signs reading, “If the farmer dies, the country dies.” Some complained to reporters that Germany and the European Union seemed to have plenty of money for foreign aid but not enough for their own people.
Berlin farmers protest gains support amid nation’s winter of discontent
In the Netherlands, farmers have been protesting the government’s attempt to slash emissions of heat-trapping gases coming from the rear ends of their dairy cows, in an ongoing conflict known as “the nitrogen wars,” which could result in culling the herds there by half. Irish farmers are also up in arms.
In France, the farmers say they are being driven into ruin — and bankruptcy — by faceless bureaucrats and new regulations, some designed to curb climate change, by cuts to their traditional subsidies on the diesel fuel used by their farm machines and by competition from imported foods.
The farmers say growing food is not like making products — and that by offshoring food production, Europe is in danger of turning the countryside into bucolic dead zones or idle backdrops for tourists.
European leaders are pushing farmers to earn their subsidies by sequestering carbon, using less pesticide and fertilizer, and setting aside less productive land for nature or solar panels. The number of insects and birds in the European countryside has dropped drastically, a worrisome decline probably tied in part to modern farming practices.
Many of the farmers protesting in Europe are independent operators, not large corporate producers, and so the greater public might be likely to sympathize with them. These are pocketbook issues for both consumers and producers.
The farmers are also rebelling against attempts by retailers and the government to bring down their prices to curb food inflation.
The farmers say their way of life is being threatened, from within France and from abroad.
Monday’s protests in France were led by the National Federation of Farmers Unions and the Young Farmers movement, whose members turned town and village road signs upside-down, in a tactic lifted from the French resistance movement that battled the German invasion in World War II.
The rhetoric is heated — and militant.
“This is the final battle for farming. It’s a question of survival,” Karine Duc, a farmer in the southwestern Lot-et-Garonne department, told Agence France-Presse as she joined a convoy headed for Paris.
The French news agency reported that a banner on a tractor in the convoy proclaimed, “We will not die in silence.”
Cyrille Milard of the French Farmers Union spoke to reporters in Réau, claiming that the protesters “hold the eight highways” into Paris. The news website Le Parisien quoted him as saying: “We will probably block until Thursday. If the pressure is not strong enough, we can go further in blocking. … We must hold on day and night.”
Representatives of the farmers union met with France’s new prime minister, Gabriel Attal, for more than three hours Monday. French President Emmanuel Macron called an earlier meeting of his cabinet before he flew off for a state visit to Sweden.
The Elysée presidential palace announced that Macron will meet European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Thursday in Brussels. The two will talk about farmers.