Macron faces 'tough' path out of farming protest crisis

French President Emmanuel Macron has tried to soothe the anger of protesting farmers by calling on the European Union to regulate agricultural imports from Ukraine and loosen farming rules. 

But Jacques Reland, a senior research fellow at the Global Policy Institute, told CGTN that Macron has a "tough" path to navigate out of this growing crisis. 

Speaking on a visit to Sweden, as farmers parked tractors across highways in France and set ablaze bales of hay on the road to Toulouse airport, Macron also rejected a draft trade deal with the Mercosur bloc of South American countries in its current form.

Reland told CGTN: "He's faced crisis after crisis, education reforms, immigration bills, budgets and so on. The problem for Macron, he has no majority power. So if you want to have a new bid adopted or new measures adopted, you need to have a majority."

Farmers are angry because their "incomes are not increasing," explained Reland. "They have to face measures adopted by European Union leaders to fight climate change, which… is making their job even more difficult." Others are upset with the idea of free trade agreements with some regions whose imports would be far more competitive than the products made in Europe.

The French protests follow similar action in other European countries, including Belgium, Germany, Poland and Romania ahead of European Parliament elections in June in which the far right, for whom farmers represent a growing constituency, is seen making gains.

The Spanish farmers' associations has said that they are planning to take to the streets in February in protest against strict European regulations and lack of government support as unrest continues to spread across Europe.

Wary of protests escalating, the French government has already dropped plans to gradually reduce subsidies on agricultural diesel and promised to ease environmental regulations.

Reland says that matters are complicated further by there being no one-size-fits-all approach to the issue, with different farmers wanting different things. He said the issue for Macron is that "populist parties, far right parties, have decided to take advantage of this crisis," by promising farmers a perfect solution.

French and Belgian farmers set up dozens of blockades on highways and on access roads to a major container port on Wednesday as protests intensified. 

A thousand Italian farmers are planning to take part in rallies in Brussels on Thursday, to press EU leaders meeting in the capital to act. 

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