2023-04-21 05:32:10
Wednesday 1is March, 7:30 a.m. Laurent Wauquiez’s face was creased by the night. It is the price to pay to cross France which rises early. The president of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region presents himself at the entrance to the Agricultural Show, discreet; the protocol service was not informed of his time of arrival. We shouldn’t spoil the authenticity of his encounter with this rural world that comes to Paris once a year. “I said hello to you, did you? », he says, shaking hands with the exhibitors.
The former minister of Nicolas Sarkozy, 48, walks the spans with long strides, crushing the dung of his suede shoes. “Don’t look down, don’t let people who criticize agriculture speak for you”, he intimates to his interlocutors. From the top of his meter ninety-one, the chosen spot in the audience the bishop of Puy-en-Velay, dressed in his black cassock, a large silver cross around his neck. Monsignor Yves Baumgarten came especially to meet him. ” Thank you for being here “, the cajole Laurent Wauquiez, who makes the monk applaud.
Lucas Brunel, a young breeder from Cantal, rushes for a selfie. “Thank you for the hunting federation…”, he whispered in the ear of the former president of the Les Républicains (LR) party, from 2017 to 2019. The young man congratulated him on the abolition of subsidies for Natura 2000 areas in the region, 266 natural sites devolved to environmental protection today ” threat “ according to nature protection associations. Hunters have taken over the management of part of the wildlife. As for the money – from European funds – the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region redirected it to the farmers of the territory. “We are trying to give ourselves a beautiful image, and it gives him the voices of rurality and hunting”, admires Lucas Brunel without false modesty.
Since Laurent Wauquiez’s first election in 2015, the budget devoted to agriculture has tripled to reach 112 million euros in 2023. Hunters have pocketed 9 million euros in additional subsidies. Even better than the anglers, already well off with their 8 million increase. During this time, the culture budget was slashed, in 2022, by 3.7 million euros. The price of a political marker.
“In 2027, it will be me or Marine Le Pen”
“Clientlist”, Laurent Wauquiez, even “sectarian”, as its opponents denounce it? Ambitious, certainly. His region wants to be a laboratory, the springboard which must help him to project himself towards the presidential election of 2027. After having given up competing in 2017 (too early), then in 2022 (he considered the ballot unwinnable for his camp) , the forties decided to take the plunge.
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