The climate of social indignation in which France has been immersed for days spread to the countryside yesterday. In the department of Deux Sèvres, in the center-west of the country, near Poitiers, there were very violent clashes between the police and radical ecologists and anti-establishment militants of the extreme left (black blocs), with the result of At least 24 police officers and 7 demonstrators were injured, including two very seriously.
The prefecture had banned the protest against a controversial plan to build 16 large water storage ponds for agricultural use. There are precedents of pitched battles years earlier at this site. Despite this, thousands of ecologists and black blocs showed up in the town of Sainte-Soline ready to challenge the 3,200 mobilized police.
From the scenes of urban guerrilla warfare experienced by many French cities in recent weeks, as part of the protest against the pension reform, it turned into a deployment and maneuvers typical of a military duel. The most extreme demonstrators carried homemade weapons, such as Molotov cocktails, iron balls and high-powered pyrotechnic material. Three police vans were completely burned.
The water war in Deux Sèvres has been going on for a few years now and is one of the expressions of the tension that exists over the use of a scarce good in a context of climate emergency and periods of drought every time longer In this case, the conflict opposes a sector of farmers and inflexible environmentalists.
The large ponds, with a total capacity of six million cubic meters, must be fed with water from the surface water tables during the winter so that they can then be used for the irrigation of the farms during the summer months in which element liquid is missing. Opponents claim that this solution will be harmful in the long term and that it means yielding to the interests of intensive and polluting industrial agriculture. Those who defend the ponds, including the Government, maintain that it is a good solution for the survival of farmers and to ensure the supply with local and not imported products. It has been promised to reduce the use of chemical fertilizers to appease environmentalists.
The Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, described the level of violence suffered by the police and gendarmes as “unqualifiable” and “unbearable”. Darmanin emphasized the responsibility of ultra-left militants.
What has happened in Deux Sèvres shows that discontent in France has multiple causes, due to various feelings of grievance, that it is spread throughout the territory and that it will be difficult for the Government to appease spirits. This insurrectionary atmosphere threatens to overwhelm the police. There are not enough anti-riot forces to cover all the foci of continued violent protest.
Various media, such as the newspaper Le Monde, published yesterday some audio recordings made incognito, on March 20, during a demonstration in Paris, in which members of the controversial motorized anti-riot brigades (BRAV- M) insulting, insulting and saying racist and sexist comments to young people detained in the street, who were, in some cases, slapped. This leak erodes the image of the police, already warned, even by the Council of Europe, for the excesses in their repression of demonstrators.
