Centre-right French president Nicolas Sarkozy is chasing the conservative rural vote to prevent disillusioned farmers from drifting towards the far right. Although the president remains the favourite in polls amongst French farmers, the French National Front (FN) has eroded some of his former support.

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The FN’s support amongst farmers has doubled since the last national election, as the party’s anti-European policies are attracting farmers frustrated with the bureaucracy associated with the Common Agricultural Policies and uncertainty of its future, although French farmers are the principal beneficiaries of CAP payments.

Farmers in France spent much of 2011 protesting. Livestock producers and horticulturalists alike were both up in arms over relentlessly rising input costs and undercutting from other producers in countries such as Spain, who had slashed their prices to recoup losses incurred by the German E.Coli outbreak. The farmers took on supermarkets and officials which would not support them by virtue of being French, the nationalistic overtones of these protests, as well as a perceived lack of support from the current government, has caused some farmers in Europe’s agricultural powerhouse to drift further to the political right.

Nicolas Sarkozy attended the Paris Farm Show this week as an attempted rapprochement to the French farming community. It would appear his efforts paid off, as he gained a warmer reception than in 2011. However, overall Mr Sarkozy is still trailing to Socialist rival François Hollande in opinion polls and so the incumbent president must win the hearts and minds of his party’s traditional support-base in the countryside if he expects to catch up.  

M Sarkozy’s visit to this year’s farm show was his longest yet, after a serious faux pas at a previous show and an overly urban image caused him to lose much of the rural vote from 2010. Although only one million of the 65 million people in France work in agriculture, their high voting turnout makes them disproportionately influential.

M Sarkozy’s party, the UMP, is hoping that farmers in the country will associate the higher returns in a range of agricultural sectors with their policies.

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