French farmers driving tractors have made good on a threat to blockade Paris for an indefinite period, paralysing eight main motorways into the city in a row over regulations, pay and taxes.
Protesters had rejected concessions made by the prime minister, Gabriel Attal, at the weekend and promised to “besiege” the capital by early afternoon on Monday.
The first motorway barrage was reported shortly before 2pm when 30 tractors blocked the A4 20 miles east of Paris in both directions. Shortly afterwards, the A13 about 35 miles north-west of Paris was blocked in the direction of the capital. Tractors were reported to have blocked other main routes into and out of the city, forcing motorists to use increasingly congested side roads.
As it became clear the farmers planned to encircle the city, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, held a crisis meeting with key cabinet ministers on what was being called “Operation Paris Siege”. A weekly meeting of ministers, normally held on a Tuesday but brought forward 24 hours, was to be held afterwards as Macron flew to Sweden for a state visit.
As many as 1,500 tractors were expected to be used in the blockades; the gendarmerie suggested a total of 16 motorways in 30 French departments were subject to blockages on Monday. Around the capital, the tractors were expected to remain between 20-25 miles from the city centre restricting routes in and out and disrupting access to the Charles de Gaulle-Roissy airport north of the city and Orly airport in the south, as well as the region’s main fresh food market at Rungis, the largest in Europe.
The interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, said 15,000 police and gendarmes had been mobilised to prevent the tractors from entering Paris and other cities where protests were happening, and to keep access open to the airports and Rungis. He warned farmers that blocking Rungis, which supplies 60% of Paris’s fresh food to about 12 million people, would be crossing a red line.
The authorities were advising drivers to cancel or postpone all non-essential road travel.
Clément Torpier, the president of the Île de France Young Farmers, told BFMTV: “The aim is not to annoy the public but to get answers from the government to come up with further measures.”
Stéphane Sanchez, the director of the Greater Paris Basin branch of the main farming union, the FNSEA, said the blockade was being organised with “almost military precision”, with shifts of farmers deployed on to the barricades.
“We’ve thought of everything and have prepared meticulously. We’re not leaving anything to chance in order to make it a real long-term siege,” Sanchez said. He said that if there was no acceptable response from the government they would also block major non-motorway roads.
Attal was expected to meet farmers’ union leaders later on Monday.
Farmers, particularly the country’s thousands of independent producers, say they are being strangled by EU and French bureaucracy and regulations and claim the traditional way of rural life is facing collapse. They are demanding fairer prices for produce, the continuation of subsidies on the agricultural diesel used to run their tractors and other vehicles, and financial aid for organic farmers.
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On Monday, hundreds of German farmers used tractors to block ports, including Hamburg, one of the busiest European hubs for container shipping, in protest at plans by the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, to scrap agriculture subsidies. The government has partially compromised but not enough to satisfy angry farmers.
In France, several farmers’ union leaders have called on members to exert maximum pressure on the government this week, particularly in the run-up to Attal’s speech to parliament on Tuesday outlining his government’s political programme.
In the south-west, protesters continued blocking roads outside Pau, Bayonne and Agen over the weekend and farmers planned to lay siege to Lyon from Monday afternoon. Farmers have also begun blocking access to ski resorts in the Pyrenees.
Arnaud Rousseau, the leader of the FNSEA, said the campaign and blockades would continue until at least Thursday, when Macron will join other leaders for a meeting of the European Council.
Rousseau said the protests would affect every French region.
On Monday morning, the agriculture minister, Marc Fesneau, said there would be new announcements addressing the protests within 48 hours and that he was travelling to Brussels this week.
“We continue to work with their representatives … we are working with them to propose a certain number of measures that will show the willingness of the government to address the crisis,” Fesneau told French television.
The French government has been taken by surprise by the depth of anger among farmers. Several months ago young farmers turned town and village road signs upside down in protest but the action has escalated in the last week.
