Why then, when one is a political leader, inflict hours of stormy wandering in the crowded and overheated bays of the Salon de l’Agriculture, between blush and bloodshed? Aren’t the peasants, after all, an aging electoral population which is inevitably disappearing from the French political landscape?
“In terms of market share, it’s not a good investment”, acknowledges Hervé Gaymard with a smile. But, underlines Jacques Chirac’s former agriculture minister from 2002 to 2004, “It’s a symbolic investment”. The one who is today president of the departmental council of Savoie never missed the appointment: “For the Minister of Agriculture, it is fundamentalhe said. I moved my office there and stayed there for the week. I came out of it exhausted, but it’s a unique opportunity to meet everyone. »
Like Hervé Gaymard, all politicians attend the Agricultural Show. Or almost. François Mitterrand is reputed to have been there only once, in 1981. And Jean-Luc Mélenchon has not been going there for many years, preferring “going out into the field to promote another model of agriculture”, explains his entourage. But for the overwhelming majority of the others, the appointment is not missed. And Emmanuel Macron, at the dawn of his candidacy for the presidential election in April, will not deviate from the rule by going to the Porte de Versailles, Saturday February 26, but for the morning only, news in Ukraine obliges. “The collective memory of the French has preserved so many images of Presidents of the Republic walking the aisles of the Salon that it has become a must, an image of Epinal of the presidential campaign”notes Jérôme Fourquet, director of the Opinion department of the IFOP.
The farmer has “a good rating”
Certainly, the peasants are fewer and fewer. The number of farms has halved in thirty years: France has less than 400,000 today. Out of 48 million voters, that’s not much. But, nuance François Purseigle, professor of sociology at the National School of Agronomics of Toulouse, “Farmers still have influential professional organizations, very present in the territory, and they are still active in the food industry. They are not scratched politically”. Moreover, the Salon cannot be reduced to this arithmetic. Because it is above all, recalls Mr. Gaymard, “a concentrate of rural France” which brings together a thousand exhibitors, “all agricultural production in the country, all territories at the same time, in the same place”during one week. “There, all of a sudden, you can send a message to an entire corporation”observes Jérôme Fourquet.
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