President Hollande grinned when they called him a “lump of manure”. That was on Saturday. Yesterday it was the turn of Manuel Valls, the prime minister, to be insulted by the farmers. “You just don’t get it, little dick,” an angry agriculteur yelled.
The unpopular Socialist president and his lieutenant were submitting to an annual ordeal of the French political calendar: a pilgrimage to the international agriculture fair in Paris.
Politicians of all camps trek through the vast show area at the Porte de Versailles to pay homage to the guardians of France’s rural soul. At the best of times, stamina is needed to spend hours patting cows and downing food and drink. With livestock farmers suffering what they say is the worst of times, the obligatory mission was torture for Mr Hollande. Although he was MP for the rural Corrèze département for more than a decade, he and his party are blamed for a collapse in dairy and meat prices.
Jetlagged after a day’s flight from Argentina, Mr Hollande was jeered and heckled as security men and riot police escorted him through the furious country folk tending some 4,000 show animals. “I hear the cries of distress,” said Mr Hollande, who is suffering dismal ratings before a run for re-election next year. “If I am here today it’s to show that there is national solidarity,” he said before admiring Cherry, a prize bazadaise cow and the show mascot.
When his back was turned, farmers destroyed the Ministry of Agriculture stand and scuffled with police. Several were arrested.
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Yesterday the pugnacious Mr Valls turned up for the 7am milking session and remonstrated with agriculteurs who called him “the puppet of Europe” and worse. “Stop giving me that bulls***t,” he told one farmer. “Do you think I only have to snap my fingers to raise milk prices?”
Mr Valls, a Spanish-born city slicker, had a ready riposte after a farmer sneered: “The politicians are there to strut about but they have no power and they are killing us.”
“It’s always the same,” the prime minister shrugged. “If we don’t show up, they call us cowards and if we come we’re supposed to be ‘strutting’.”
The foul mood at the farm show, a national celebration visited by 700,000 people and broadcast live for a week, contrasted with happy memories of Jacques Chirac, an extrovert self-styled countryman. The former president spent days hobnobbing and feasting on saucisson, veal’s head and wine and beer.
The agricultural world had until recently voted heavily for the centre-right party of Mr Chirac and his successor Nicolas Sarkozy but frustration with falling prices and the state’s failure to subsidise them more has pushed many into the arms of Marine Le Pen and her far-right National Front.
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Ms Le Pen arrives at the show this morning, aiming to make new converts in a ten-hour visit. “I am the only politician who is welcome there now,” Ms Le Pen said yesterday as she mocked Mr Hollande for “having to sprint away because he has betrayed the farmers so much”. A poll last week showed that 36 per cent of farmers were planning to vote for Ms Le Pen next year.
The president knows that he has little public sympathy: 81 per cent of people strongly support recent protests — often violent — staged by farmers, another poll showed.