French farmers look to Le Pen to end EU torment
farmhouses are a picture of bucolic bliss, but anger in the nation’s leading agricultural region is shifting sentiment in favour of Marine Le Pen’s anti-EU Front National.
“If France left the EU, I hope things would get better,” said Mr Hourdel as he watched his sows bedding down.
France is the biggest beneficiary of EU farm aid, but more than a third of farmers earned less than €4,200 (£3,560) last year, squeezed by falling food prices and cheaper imports from other member states.
Some recorded six-figure losses and many were driven into debt. More than 600 livestock farms went bankrupt — a record. On average, one farmer committed suicide every two days, according to France’s public health agency.
“We pay a lot into the EU and they give little back,” Mr Hourdel said. “We’re paying for subsidies that go to eastern Europe, financing countries that are competing with us.”
Mr Hourdel, who also grows crops on his 300-acre farm, collects €40,000 a year in subsidies, but says his expenses are much higher. He would prefer to see EU aid replaced by a national system of quotas and subsidies, as Ms Le Pen proposes.
Mr Hourdel struggles to make repayments on €3 million in loans. “The bank manager phones me three times a week. In 1999, I was selling pork for the equivalent of €2 per kilo and now it’s down to €1.40. I have to pay five employees and I can’t get by without them. We all work flat out.”
Like many other farmers, Mr Hourdel, 53, used to vote for mainstream conservatives. Now he feels that Ms Le Pen is the only presidential candidate this spring who is genuinely offering farmers a solution.
Imports of cheaper German pork and milk and Spanish fruit have hurt farmers. Labour costs are higher in France because of taxes and compulsory welfare contributions. Also, German abattoirs use temporary workers from east Europe on lower pay rates.
François Hollande, the French president, met with a hostile reception at an agricultural show yesterday. “We’re dying,” a farmer told him. Mr Hollande said the event was “marked by deep sadness and the seriousness of the crises we are going through”.
Meanwhile, conservative candidate François Fillon said he would “take immediate measures to ensure that farmers can make a decent living.”
But Jérôme Fourquet of the Institut Français d’opinion polling firm said: “Farmers feel increasingly left out and they are being tempted by the Front National.”
Mr Hourdel added: “What I really want is is to be paid at a fair price for what I do, but that will never happen as things stand now.
“The EU has tied us up in a straitjacket of regulations so we can’t compete with other member states. The only candidate who’s talking about confronting this situation is Marine Le Pen. Saying you’re going to vote for her isn’t the taboo it used to be.”