At the start of 2025, the counting of the professional elections will show whether the former single union FNSEA, founded in 1946, has managed to maintain its hegemony over the chambers of agriculture, with its ally Young Farmers (JA).
The demonstrations and highway blockades last winter, and the unprecedented harvest of government promises that followed, showed that the majority alliance remained at the center of the game. But its leaders were at times overwhelmed by the base, and rival unions have gained visibility, in particular the Rural Coordination (CR) and its yellow caps. This organization, which currently chairs three departmental chambers of agriculture, wants to win new ones and sees the vote as a “referendum” for or against the current system, according to its president Véronique Le Floc’h. The union is increasing its attacks against the president of the FNSEA, Arnaud Rousseau, who also chairs the agro-industrial giant Avril (Lesieur oils, Sanders, etc.). In Agen at the end of November, he was exfiltrated from an event by the police, to the boos of the local CR. The other unions criticize him for his double hat, synonymous, according to them, with a double game to the detriment of farmers.
Temptation of populism
“When we don’t have an argument, we attack people directly,” sweeps the president of JA, Pierrick Horel, who notes that the campaign for the chambers is more “intense” than six years ago . “We’ve been talking about agriculture everywhere in the media for a year, and rightly so,” he remarks, while observing a “rise in populism, particularly with union competition from the CR.”
“The CR vote is riding the populist wave,” also believes the national secretary of the Peasant Confederation, Sylvie Colas, for whom “they make a lot of noise but do not work.”
For political scientist Eddy Fougier, “the Rural Coordination, even if it denies being close to the National Rally, is part of a sovereignist, identity-based, populist dynamic. Some speak of neo-poujadism,” he told AFP.
The spokesperson for the CR, Patrick Legras, evacuates: “We are trying to give an electric shock to the farmers who are not unionized”, to show them that “we are going into the wall”. The farmer from the Somme – who denounces “mafia”, “agribusiness”, “globalism” in his tweets – defends “truth speaking” in the face of “political correctness”.
Election participation rate
According to a national official of the FNSEA, on condition of anonymity, the CR can take over “a few departments”, where the situation is “the most critical”, where farmers are becoming “impoverished”.
“The two unknowns for the election are the participation rate and the number of rooms won by the CR,” continues political scientist Eddy Fougier.
“One in two farmers in this country […] didn’t vote last time. I don’t know if you see […] the reserve of votes that it makes. And so we have to go and find these people,” Arnaud Rousseau recently told his troops during a meeting in the Dordogne.
Behind the issues of power, models clash. Opposition or accommodation with free trade, desire to free the agricultural world from as many standards as possible or calls to change the system to save the planet…
“The farmers are in the worst situation and it is up to the one who will do the most to recover votes. We don’t want to get into that game,” says Pierre Thomas. As vice-president of Modef, the smallest agricultural union, he advocates for a shift in agricultural policy, with a mix of protectionism and increased attention to nature.
On the other hand, the FNSEA is resolutely opposed to degrowth. A program battered by health crises, climatic upheavals and the uninterrupted decline in the number of farmers, which is no longer compensated by expansion or by increased yields.
This shrinking of the agricultural population has repercussions on the composition of the electoral college.
“In Gers, we have lost 1,000 active people, therefore 1,000 voters since 2019,” observes Sylvie Colas, wondering “who they were voting for six years ago”, and therefore which organization will suffer from these fewer votes.
AFP
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