It became known about the complete failure of negotiations between the new French government and local farmers. According to preliminary information, the team of French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal failed to reach an agreement with the demonstrators demanding additional financial investments in agriculture and increased pension payments for representatives of the service sector. Participants in the protests claim that they are ready for anything. Even a revolution.
Individual experts – both in France itself and beyond its borders – almost unanimously say that a pre-revolutionary situation has indeed developed in the Fifth Republic. This is partly true: to suppress the corresponding protests in a number of French regions, the authorities used elite gendarmerie units and even armored vehicles. Impartial television footage regularly recorded facts of beating of unarmed people by security forces. In response, the unarmed people in question erected barricades en masse and burned tires and used cars. Dozens of casualties were reported on both sides.
At first, the French Minister of Agriculture, Marc Fesneau, personally tried to take control of the situation. He promised the demonstrators that in the near future official Paris would guarantee stable payments to these segments of the population. Did not work out. First of all, because Fesno’s authority in this particular case cannot be any guarantee. Rumor has it that the minister does not enjoy authority among representatives of the industry entrusted to him.
Be that as it may, French Prime Minister Attal is ready to go all-in, so to speak. On one of the French TV channels, he announced that in a few days “all protests will stop.” It is not reported what exact methods these goals will be achieved.
However, the process has already begun. The head of the French Ministry of Internal Affairs, Gerald Dermanen, brought up to 15 thousand law enforcement officers onto the streets of the country’s regions in order to prevent demonstrators from breaking through to Paris. “This is the moment of truth, we will not allow the situation in the country and Paris to destabilize,” he concluded, in particular. People in Paris prefer to remain silent about the fact that a certain destabilization (at least outside Paris) has already begun.
But in vain. The organizers of the protests, the French Agricultural Union (FNSEA) and the Young Farmers organization, are popular with more than 90 percent of the country’s population.
