The alphorn sounds, as Valérie Pécresse descends the slippery slope leading to the dairy cow farm Chez Ducreux. All around, a thick blanket of snow covers the Doubs valley, illuminated by a particularly bright sun on Thursday, January 13. Here, we make milk for the production of PDO county. The Ducreux farm is part of a cooperative producing this cheese, the origin of which dates back seven hundred years. Out of the question then to deprive yourself of this little pleasure. Invited to taste on a small terrace overlooking the surroundings, Valérie Pécresse submits to it with relish. “You have to taste everything. It is my secret of the victorious campaigns ”, she jokes. The county, explains an actor in the sector, is “The second regional employer in terms of sector, following Peugeot”.
On Thursday, Valérie Pécresse therefore came to talk regarding agriculture. “We cannot talk regarding this subject only at the Agricultural Show, we must show that we do not forget the farmers, that we talk to them”, explains the deputy (Les Républicains, LR) for Aisne Julien Dive who recalls that, in the next ten years, half of the farms in France risk disappearing. Especially since this is an electorate often acquired on the right, but all the candidates are arguing. And what does it matter if the subject of the moment is rather health, with the lengthening of the queues for the tests in front of the pharmacies. “The campaign, if we follow Macron, will only revolve around the sanitary. Valérie Pécresse is committed to expanding across the country. She has shown that she neglects nothing and nobody ”, explains local LR deputy Annie Genevard.
The opportunity also, for Valérie Pécresse, to get rid of a very Ile-de-France image which prevents it from differentiating itself from Emmanuel Macron. By addressing farmers, she seeks to speak to a much larger category of the population, sensitive to these issues. “Ile-de-France is not just Paris, and there is a lot of agricultural land in the region, which is not only large cereal farms”, recalls the president of Hauts-de-France, Xavier Bertrand, who refuses this criticism and questions: “Where do the other candidates live? In Paris too. “ “75% of the territory of Ile-de-France is forests and agricultural land, I have a real agricultural policy in my region to pursue”, explains Valérie Pécresse a few moments later, invited to speak at a round table in Villers-le-Lac.
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