A woman and her teenage daughter have died in southern France after a car hit a roadblock where they were standing. The blockade had been set up by farmers taking part in growing anti-government protests.
The 35-year-old woman and her 14-year-old daughter were killed at 5.45am when a car went through a warning barrage and collided at speed with bales of straw piled up to stop traffic in Pamiers, Ariège, to the south of Toulouse.
The woman’s husband was seriously injured. The three people in the car, all Armenian nationals, were being questioned on suspicion of involuntary manslaughter.
The woman who was killed was a member of the powerful FNSEA farmers union, which has been leading nationwide protests. Her daughter was taken to hospital but later died.
Olivier Mouysset, a local prosecutor, said early results of the investigation suggested the car, carrying a couple and a friend, had not rammed the barrier intentionally. In the dark, the car ran into a wall of straw bales at the roadblock, hit the three people and only came to a halt when it crashed into a tractor’s trailer, Mouysset said.
The farming protests – calling on the government to cut regulations and taxes and ensure better prices for produce – have presented Emmanuel Macron’s newly appointed prime minister, Gabriel Attal, with his first major headache, as convoys of tractors continued to block key roads across France on Tuesday and farmers held demonstrations in towns.
Attal wrote on social media that “the nation is devastated” by the farmer’s death at the roadblock.
Macron said he had asked his government “to offer concrete solutions” to the farmers’ problems. “My thoughts go out to the victims and their loved ones who are mourning them,” he said, calling Tuesday’s collision “a drama that has devastated us all”.
Attal met farming unions on Monday night but did not assuage their anger. From Tuesday morning, farmers blocked roads across the country, including the areas around Toulouse in the south-west, Isère in the south-east, and Beauvais in the north.
“We’re prepared for anything, we’ve got nothing to lose,” said Josep Perez, a protester interviewed by BFM TV at a roadblock in the south-western fruit-growing region around Agen, where traffic on the A62 motorway had been disrupted.
Farmers on Tuesday drove to the prefect’s office in Agen and dumped piles of tripe from a local abattoir, threw kiwifruit, and splattered the front of the building in red paint. They hung a banner saying: “We won’t die in silence.”
Arnaud Rousseau, the head of the FNSEA union, told RMC radio that the protests could last “a day, a week” or “as long as it takes” for the government to respond. “Every minute, we’re learning of a new roadblock,” he said. Every single département in France would be involved at some point during this week, he said.
Arnaud Gaillot, the head of the Young Farmers union, said: “We won’t lift the roadblocks until the prime minister makes very clear announcements … the time for talking is over, action is needed.”
The government recently put its long-awaited agriculture bill on hold again, saying it wants to hear from farming representatives before including additional measures to support the sector.
When Attal met farming representatives on Monday, he promised a number of measures would be announced by the end of the week, according to the agriculture minister, Marc Fesneau.
Farmers said anger was growing for several reasons. Many feel abandoned in the face of the climate crisis, with droughts and severe weather conditions, but there is also fury at what they see as impossibly low prices for their products in the food sector, the difficulty of red tape, complex environmental norms and green policies, such as on water use, which they say are affecting profits. There is also anger about taxes on off-road diesel, which affects farmers.
The farmers’ protests in France come amid other tractor demonstrations in European countries, such as Germany and Romania, before European parliament elections in June.
France, the EU’s biggest agricultural producer, has thousands of independent producers of meat, dairy, fruit and vegetables and wine, who have a record of staging disruptive protests.
The government fears the protests could spread to other people angry about the cost of living and energy prices. Fabien Roussel, the head of the Communist party, said there should be a “convergence of anger”, calling on others to put pressure on the government over the tax on off-road diesel, as well as the rise in electricity prices and a rise in medicine costs.
In the lead-up to the European parliament elections, Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party has appealed to farmers and rural voters.
Her party colleague Jean-Philippe Tanguy said: “Farmers are at last getting the attention of public powers.” He said he was surprised it was taking Attal so long “to understand the way French farming works”.
