Prime Minister Gabriel Attal during a government question session at the Assemblée Nationale in Paris on February 27, 2024. STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN / AFP
It was expected that agriculture would be the opening subject of debate during Tuesday's questions to the government at the Assemblée Nationale, halfway through the highly-politicized Paris Agricultural Show. Instead, it was President Emmanuel Macron's controversial remarks on Ukraine, made the evening before, that animated lawmakers. "There is no consensus today to send troops on the ground in an official, accepted and endorsed manner," Macron had declared on Monday evening, at the end of an international conference in support of Ukraine held at the Elysée Palace. "But no option should be discarded," he added, proclaiming his "strategic ambiguity."
Read more Subscribers only Macron defends idea of potentially sending troops to Ukraine as allies distance themselves
By raising for the first time the idea of sending troops to Ukraine, the French leader "has taken a further step toward belligerence," blasted his rival Marine Le Pen, of the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party. She accused him of "posing an existential risk to 70 million French people, and more particularly to our armed forces already deployed in Eastern Europe."
"I'm told it's in the interests of humanity. But what is this divine right that has made France the soldier of every just cause in the world, while the only global empire in existence, the United States, refuses to do the same?" said Le Pen, quoting former Socialist president François Mitterrand.
"You've been waiting for the first opportunity to remind people of your true loyalties [and] "show your true colors," retorted Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, who had left the Paris Agricultural Show to attend the verbal joust. "When you read the investigations that are being carried out, [such as one published by the Washington Post on December 30, showing the RN's persistent links with Moscow], you have to wonder whether Vladimir Putin's troops aren't already in our country," he continued. "I'm talking about you and your troops, Ms. Le Pen."
Agriculture Minister Marc Fesneau called the RN a "party from abroad" a week earlier. "It's obviously the party of Russia," said Fesneau accusingly on radio station France Inter on February 18. "Just two years ago," Attal reminded Le Pen on Tuesday, "You were defending a military alliance with Russia. (...) If you had been elected in 2022, we'd be supplying arms to Russia to crush the Ukrainians, that's the reality."
Left-wing opposition parties were also alarmed by the Macron's remarks. "This impromptu statement, lightly delivered (...), sounds like a totally irresponsible militaristic headlong rush," reacted André Chassaigne, president of the Communist group in the Assemblée. Attal retorted: "By fighting to support the Ukrainians against the Russian aggressor, we are fighting to support our values, our democratic model and the rule of law."
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