Once again, France’s farmers have been blocking motorways with their tractors in protest, this time at an impending EU trade agreement with a group of South American countries in a common market known as Mercosur, which has been 25 years in the making.
The tragedy is that while the EU can finally claim an important victory in its strategy of sealing rules-based free-trade pacts with key regions and countries worldwide to counter aggressive US trade protectionism, in so doing it is helping the Eurosceptic far right to electoral victory in France. Losing the support of France, a founding member, for European integration if the far right wins power, would have a more damaging impact on the long-term stability of the EU than any trade boost with Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay.
This bind is not the fault of “Brussels bureaucrats” – the easy target for all grievances around Europe. The European Commission has bent over backwards to craft safeguard clauses and emergency brakes in case of a sudden surge in food imports. It has brought forward planned future agricultural spending to assuage farming countries such as France, Poland, Ireland and Italy. Farmers fear that cheap South American beef, not produced to strict EU standards, will flood their markets.
It’s mostly down to the collective cowardice of France’s political leaders, starting with the president, Emmanuel Macron. Macron voted against the Mercosur deal despite securing protections in case European markets were swamped with steak from the Pampas. He and French politicians across the spectrum would rather pander to the farm lobby, which represents less than 4% of GDP and 2.5% of the workforce, than tell voters the truth – that the crisis of cattle rearers has nothing to do with Mercosur, and that other sectors, including wine and cheese makers as well as other industries, stand to profit from the deal.
Macron was elected in 2017 as a pro-European liberal reformer, determined to make France more attractive to domestic and foreign investors, boost the tech sector and modernise the generous welfare and pension systems to make them sustainable. Now a lame duck without a parliamentary majority, he has chosen to appease French farmers in an attempt to get them off the streets, rather than stand by his European convictions.
Macron’s surrender to the beef producers legitimises their claims that the Mercosur deal will kill French agriculture. This is baloney. They said the same about the EU-Canada trade pact known as Ceta a few years ago, yet French exports to Canada (including wine and cheese) have flourished and there has been no flood of hormone-fed beef imports. The awkward truth is that French cattle farmers are hurting mostly because their costs have risen faster than the prices they get from the big supermarket chains that dominate the meat market, and they are drowning in regulatory paperwork.
Macron was cornered by the political timing. He is trying to avoid his desperately weak minority government being toppled by a parliamentary censure motion. Sébastien Lecornu, his fifth prime minister in two turbulent years, is struggling to push a budget through a parliament seething with rebellion ahead of municipal elections in March and a presidential election next year. The electoral calendar is driving each party to oppose the unpopular president and refuse to take responsibility for painful spending cuts to reduce the swollen deficit.
“Brussels” is a convenient scapegoat to deflect blame for the tractors inconveniently blocking roads and their drivers striking poses in front of the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower. But the impact on French public opinion is to legitimise the far-right and extreme-left narrative that the EU is to blame for France’s economic woes and the decline of its influence. Opinion polls show the agrarian revolt has nearly 80% public support. A rightwing farmers’ union, Coordination Rurale, which has grown to be the second-largest French agricultural union and is close to the hard-right National Rally (RN) in its hostility to EU agricultural policy and environmental regulations, has spearheaded the anti-Mercosur movement. The RN is gaining ground among rural voters who traditionally voted for the mainstream conservative Gaullists.
Macron looks weak and ineffective on the European stage because he failed to rally a blocking minority to prevent the Mercosur deal being approved in a majority vote. The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, was to sign it in Paraguay on Saturday. France is pushing for the European parliament to send the deal to the European court of justice for legal scrutiny or vote it down when it comes up for ratification in the next few weeks. Neither manoeuvre seems likely to succeed.
The more profound impact of the failure of French political leaders to defend the economic benefits of the Mercosur deal, and of free trade agreements in general, is to reinforce public fears that Europe is ignoring and doing down France. That plays into the RN’s campaign themes of wrenching back power from Brussels and cutting France’s payment to the EU.
While RN leader Marine Le Pen has dropped her past policies of advocating withdrawal from the euro or the EU, which proved a vote-loser after French voters saw the damage wreaked by Brexit, a less radical brand of Euroscepticism could help propel Le Pen’s popular young protege, Jordan Bardella, into the Élysée Palace next year. That would set Paris on a collision course with the EU and with Germany, which Bardella and radical-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon depict as the evil force behind Brussels’ free trade drive.
Paul Taylor is a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre