The chief of the recently-founded “Alliance Rurale” occasion in France, Willy Schraen, instructed Euractiv in an interview that if he’s elected as an MEP, he goals to create a ‘rural affairs’ group within the EU Home with like-minded lawmakers.
Schraen mentioned that he’s at the moment involved with all of the events that share the “identical values of custom and rural tradition in opposition to the environmentalist and animalistic drift”, together with the Dutch Agrarian Occasion (BBB), which received the native elections within the Netherlands in March 2023.
If elected, Schraen intends to create a “non-ideological group for rural affairs” to defend these values throughout the European Parliament, for which, as Schraen himself admits, he might want to have MEPs on his facet.
Schraen, the previous chief of the French hunters’ federation FNC, launched the brand new political occasion in France in December. The final rural motion in France was the “Chasse pêche nature et custom”, which ran within the 1999 European elections gaining 6.67% of the votes and 6 seats within the European Parliament.
Whereas his predecessor’s marketing campaign targeted on defending hunters, Schraen intends to open up his motion to “the entire rural world”, noting that “the sense of frustration and anger that existed within the searching world 25 years in the past now extends to the entire rural world”.
“Rural areas are sending out a transparent message: Europe should allow us to stay peacefully. There’s an unprecedented financial, geopolitical and social disaster, and we simply should be allowed to breathe. In any other case, the stress cooker will explode,” Schraen mentioned.
The Alliance Rurale motion has voiced its assist for German farmers, who’ve been protesting the curbing of a tax break on agricultural diesel over the previous two weeks.
It additionally lent its assist to French farmers who protested in Toulouse on Tuesday (16 January), the place practically 1,000 demonstrators and greater than 400 tractors gathered to protest low incomes, obstacles to establishing farms and EU guidelines.
“We have to cease giving farmers a tough time. This spiral of requirements, bans and constraints will result in a 15% drop in agricultural manufacturing. We’re nonetheless going to supply, however much less and extra expensively,” argued Schraen, who, like French President Emmanuel Macron and a number of other EU international locations, desires to decelerate law-making to maintain up with Inexperienced Deal targets.
Ukrainian imports, animal welfare, and the wolf
As for the EU’s liberalisation of Ukrainian agricultural imports, that are placing stress on farmers’ remuneration within the frontline EU international locations, Schraen criticised the EU for its lax response on such points.
“It’s not as a result of Ukraine goes by troublesome occasions that we’ve got the appropriate to destroy our agricultural manufacturing,” he mentioned.
In his view, the EU must impose greater well being and environmental requirements on meals merchandise coming into the one market, within the type of so-called “mirror clauses”, whereas on the identical time “loosening the stranglehold” of requirements on intra-European manufacturing.
“We are able to’t ask the remainder of the world to do issues as advanced as we’re doing in Europe,” he added.
Talking of animal welfare, which is a key situation for the agricultural record, Schraen warned that EU plans on the matter, though much less formidable than anticipated, “will spell the top of the connection between animals and people in Europe, each livestock and even pets”.
“We are able to not go searching, fishing, breed animals, attend bullfights, eat meat… We’ll put a cease to this technocratic drift. Will our existence nonetheless be attainable in 10 years? I’m unsure,” he continued.
One other necessary situation for Schraen’s EU election bid is wolves.
On the finish of December, the European Fee proposed altering the safety standing of the big predator, which is enshrined within the Habitats Directive, from “strictly protected” to “protected” – a measure that will facilitate searching.
For Schraen, who has been “ready for this for 10 years”, “the inhabitants in France should be lowered”.
In his view, the accidents brought on by wolves and bears, notably in Romania and Hungary, might at some point occur in France. “We’re heading for catastrophe,” he mentioned whereas calling for pressing inhabitants regulation.
“We’re instructed that there are between 550 and 700 wolves in France [according to the French Office for Biodiversity], which is the most important environmentalist lie of the final 50 years,” he mentioned, saying that he believes the quantity is between 2,500 and three,000.
Schraen additionally admitted that the wolf threatens pastures in open mountain areas created by livestock farming endowed with “distinctive natural world”.
Replying to Le Pen’s RN
Since asserting his EU bid, Schraens has come beneath fireplace from different political groupings, notably Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement Nationwide (RN).
RN suspects an unofficial settlement between Schraens and Macron’s presidential majority within the Nationwide Meeting to weaken the far-right occasion, which has sturdy roots in rural areas – an assault based mostly particularly on Schraen’s public assist for Macron within the second spherical of the 2022 presidential elections.
However the man who desires to get rural issues on the agenda dismisses such accusations.
“On the time, I used to be talking as President of the Nationwide Federation of Hunters, and amongst those that might win, Emmanuel Macron was the one who might deliver essentially the most to the searching world,” he mentioned in 2022.
[Edited by Angelo Di Mambro/Nathalie Weatherald]