This year 1,095 winegrowers in the Gironde have ripped out 7,825 hectares of vines. Over a quarter of the region’s vineyards have been destroyed since 2023. Across the Gironde estuary from the chateaux of Haut-Médoc lie the less fashionable farmlands of the region around Bordeaux. They have been triply battered of late: by extreme heat this summer, higher energy costs and a global decline in the drinking of everyday wine. Many farmers have given up. Blackened piles of vines (pictured) lie in some fields ready to be burned.
In the city of Bordeaux, rioters have set barricades ablaze in recent weeks. But this is the quieter, less visible side of France’s current discontent. Here, in the town of Blaye, pupils blockaded their secondary school; but it passed off calmly. The feeling is distress rather than rage. Locals are sceptical about the future and worried about the cost of filling the tank in a place where a car is essential, and think the government is doing nothing to help. For decades rural Gironde tilted to the left, while the centre-right ruled in the prosperous city of Bordeaux. Yet something has broken in voters’ trust in government and in their faith in the social contract. Confidence in mainstream politics is collapsing. After a decade in office Mr Macron and the centrist politics he ushered in no longer represent promise, but disappointment. Such distress is shifting the balance of hope to the RN.
For 20 years the parliamentary constituency around Blaye was held by a Socialist, before swinging to the centrist party of President Emmanuel Macron in 2017. At parliamentary elections in 2022, however, the seat was captured by Edwige Diaz of Marine Le Pen’s populist-right National Rally (RN). Two years later she was re-elected in the first round, with 53% of the vote. In September the 39-year-old Ms Diaz, whose grandfather was a Communist, was elected to the senate. Just 16% of all respondents told a poll in October that Mr Macron is a good president, a record low since he was elected in 2017. In another, 81% held the government responsible for the recent violence. Consumer confidence has fallen to its lowest for 13 years.
“I’m sad, not angry,” says a vineyard owner, who is packing it in after 30 years due to the collapse of exports to China and of wine-drinking in France, adding: “We have a president who doesn’t listen. One winegrower in the Gironde says simply that he feels “defeated”.
