Emmanuel Macron put on his wellington boots and lunched with farmers in the heart of France yesterday in an effort to shed his image as a Parisian who dislikes the countryside.
A day after lecturing the global elite at Davos the 40-year-old president laid out to sceptical farmers his vision for a remodelling of French agriculture and a revolution in the EU’s “unintelligible” subsidy system.
The reception was cool despite Mr Macron’s paean to the “eternal soul” of the countryside and “the small-farmer’s love of the land” — and a promise to protect them from global competition.
Mr Macron has immersed himself for two days in the farmland of the hill country around Clermont-Ferrand after Laurent Wauquiez, the conservative opposition leader, called him “the most Parisian of all presidents”.
Mr Wauquiez, who became chief of Nicolas Sarkozy’s Republicans’ party this month, also accused Mr Macron, a former merchant banker, of “hating the provinces and holding rural France in contempt”. Mr Wauquiez is also president of the region that Mr Macron is visiting — Auvergne-Rhône-Alps — but did not to turn up to greet him.
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Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Front mocked Mr Macron for celebrating globalisation at Davos and then “visiting the chief victims of that system: the farmers”. In many rural areas Ms Le Pen and François Fillon, the Republicans candidate, scored better than Mr Macron in the presidential elections.
Mr Macron has gone out of his way to antagonise “peripheral” France, local mayors and business owners say. After cutting council funding from central government, he has just announced a 50mph speed limit on country roads.
His approval rating fell five points to 48 per cent last week after he scrapped plans for an airport near Nantes. The new speed limit is seen as a punishment inflicted on the countryside, Le Parisien newspaper said. The inhabitants of rural areas were “simmering with anger” towards what they saw as a high-handed Parisian president, it added.
Mr Macron “lacks rural roots”, Jérôme Fourquet, head of Ifop polling, said. “The French see it in his career, which was much more in tune with the metropolis and the business world than with rural regions,” he added.
All presidents for the past 44 years, with the exception of Mr Sarkozy, won office by playing up their rural origins, although they had spent all their working lives in Paris. Jacques Chirac cast himself as a rustic from Corrèze despite being mayor of Paris for two decades.
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Mr Macron told farmers in the village of Saint-Genès-Champanelle that he understood their industry was suffering from low world prices for agricultural goods and spoke of plans to refocus agriculture on high-quality food.
Farmers were shocked last week when Christophe Castaner, the government spokesman, said that French agriculture was “totally out of date”.
Previous governments had “committed strategic errors” in farm policy that favoured mass production, Mr Macron said. “There is no future in trying to compete with Brazilian chicken or New Zealand milk.” He promised to stop supermarkets offering producers prices that threatened their livelihood. But he did little to allay farmers’ fears that he would rob them of EU subsidies. The Common Agricultural Policy must be simplified and relaunched to protect European farmers’ incomes, he said.