The AP-7 has been left open at mid-morning at the La Jonquera border in both directions, after the cuts since Friday due to the protest by French farmers in Le Boulou.
Minutes before 11.30 are still 2 kilometers of retentions at exit 3 and all traffic is no longer necessarily diverted through exit 3, reports the Servei Català de Trànsit (SCT).
Traffic was cut off on Friday at noon and that forced transporters They will spend the night waiting for the border to reopen in parking lots and service areas of La Jonquera and nearby towns.
However, other secondary routes of access to France are not passable for heavy vehicles, so trucks are accumulating in various surrounding parking lots, waiting to be able to circulate again. The AP-9 also remains closed, in this case until El Voló.
The protests took hold on Friday night when the National Federation of Agricultural Operators’ Unions (FNSEA) and Young Farmers (JJAA), two of the main organizations of the sector in France, urged continue with the mobilizations throughout the country, despite the French Government’s announcements to appease the protests.
Macron concessions
The French government announced this Friday measures to try to calm protests agricultural producers who since Eight days ago they blocked roads throughout the country, but the main union of the sector considered them insufficient and called to maintain the movement.
The Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal, promised among other things the suppression of diesel price increases for agricultural use and reaffirmed his opposition to the signing of the agreement between the EU and Mercosur.
“You wanted to send a message (…). The message has been received loud and clear,” said Attal during a visit to a rancher in Montastruc-de-Salies, in the south of France, and also announced a greater control of negotiations between producers and distributors, aid to specific sectors such as organic agriculture and a reduction in administrative procedures.
Black Friday
For a little over a week, dozens of barricades have pnormalized traffic on hundreds of kilometers of highways and, from the first hour of this Friday, some of the main access roads to Paris were cut off.
While the Government has assured that it has no intention of send police officers to dissipate protests, which it considers peaceful, some episodes of violence have been recorded, such as the burning of the façade of the Executive delegation in the city of Agen (southern France) last Wednesday.
The mobilizations of the French agricultural unions blocked the main roads of the country on a ‘black Friday’ for mobility, which has forced traffic to be cut off on the AP-7 highway on the border between Spain and France due to La Jonquera. In addition, the French Gendarmerie blocked the A9 highway in both directions in El Pertús. Since shortly after two in the afternoon, protesters also blocked departures from Paris, with barricades in five strategic points on the outskirts of the capital.
Related news
The situation was especially complicated in the surroundings of Paris, where farmers wanted to prevent the mobility of people who had planned to go out this weekend. In Narbonne, the headquarters of the Agricultural Social Mutual Society burned, in an action that according to the prefect of the Aude department, Christian Pouget, “had a clearly intentional origin.”
The roads in the south of the country, the A9 (the motorway that enters France through La Jonquera) and the A7 (the one that runs between Marseille and Lyon) added a total of 400 kilometers closed to traffic. “We have never seen something like this, on such a scale and for such a duration,” a spokesperson for the Vinci Autoroutes company, which manages these two important road axes, explained to the France Press agency. Specifically, these protests in the Aude The wine producers have called for themwho were also responsible for the assaults on trucks that took place in October.