French farmers entered the center of Paris with tractors on Thursday morning and reached the Eiffel Tower to express their demands. The agricultural sector has been mobilized for several weeks throughout France.
French farmers entered the center of Paris with their tractors on Thursday morning. PHOTO: X/@claudarnaud
“They walk around Paris”, a spokesman for the Coordination Rurale union told AFP. “Several dozen tractors” they entered the French capital from the south and circulated including the Champs-Élysées boulevard. According to trade union sources and an AFP journalist on the spot, quoted by Agerpres, approximately twenty farmers were in the Eiffel Tower area, where they parked around ten tractors.
Coordination Rurale is protesting especially against the free trade agreement between the European Union and the Mercosur countries, but also against the way in which the French Government managed the outbreak of bovine nodular dermatosis, a situation that caused discontent among farmers in the south-west of France at the beginning of December.
From the winter of 2024, farmers demand the simplification of administrative procedures and the relaxation of regulations, especially the European ones, which they consider too restrictive and generating unfair competition.
“We will come at any price to express our demands”, Eloi Nespoulous, president of the Occitanie branch of the Coordination Rurale union, told AFP on Wednesday as he led a convoy of around 40 tractors.
For his part, the national president of the union, Bertrand Venteau, previously stated that he wants to present his “peaceful” the demands of French parliamentarians and in symbolic places in Paris, even if this could lead to the detention of some protesters by law enforcement.
The Police Prefecture of Paris issued an order on Wednesday evening by which tractors were prohibited from accessing several sensitive areas of the capital, including the Élysée Palace, the seat of the Government in Matignon, the Parliament, the Ministries of Agriculture and Ecological Transition, as well as the wholesale market in Rungis.
