Gabriel Attal has only been in his job for two weeks but the youngest prime minister in the history of the Fifth Republic is already facing a series of crises. The most pressing issue for the 34-year-old premier is the farmers’ protest, which began last Friday when a blockade was erected on the A64 motorway west of Toulouse.

Early yesterday morning a car drove into the blockade, killing a farmer and her 12-year-old daughter. Details of the crash emerged throughout the day: it was not a deliberate act, the driver and the occupants were foreign and were confused by the protest. Then it was revealed that the three people in the car were Armenians, in the country illegally, after their application for asylum had been rejected last year. They should have been deported but, as is frequently the case, the three individuals ignored the expulsion order and no official executed it.

The farmers are testing Attal, using him to get at Macron, the primary target of their fury

Details were also revealed on Tuesday of a man arrested on suspicion of raping a student at knifepoint in her university hall of residence last week. Born in Congo, the man has a series of convictions for serious sexual assault in recent years but had served only brief spells in prison. He was released on 4 January and is alleged to have raped the student two weeks later.

There is a reason why Marine Le Pen doesn’t make as many media appearances as she once did. She doesn’t need to. People are turning to her National Rally party in their droves because of the stories they read in the papers and watch on the news. France is descending into anarchy.

Only those on the far left refuse to accept the terrible truth of the situation. A few thousand of them marched through Paris on Sunday to protest against the passing last month of an immigration law designed to tighten the rules under which non-EU citizens can settle in France. The rest of the country looked on in contempt.

Many actually think that the Bill, far from getting to grips with the problem, will have little effect because the numbers of people pouring into France are simply too great. On a day when the bad news just kept coming for Attal, government figures published yesterday revealed that a record number of people sought asylum in France last year: 142,500 in total, an increase of 8 per cent on 2022. The most applications came from Afghans, Bangladeshis, Turks, Congolese and Guineans.

For years the destination of most migrants and asylum seekers who enter France has been Paris. In the past they have been left to rot in filthy shanty towns in the north of the capital, but with the Paris Olympics six months away Macron has ordered these eyesores to be removed.

So, in recent months, batches of migrants have been bussed out to the countryside – to the growing anger of rural mayors. One, Bernard Carayon of the centre-right Republican party, launched a campaign this week to stop what he calls a ‘dangerous’ and ‘irresponsible’ policy. The initiative has been welcomed by several other mayors, among them Nicolas Daragon in the southern town of Valence. ‘We will not be the scapegoats for a state that is incapable of taking effective action,’ he declared.

When Attal took the job a fortnight ago he knew that immigration would be high on his agenda; but the speed of the farmers’ protest has caught him and his government by surprise. It may be that its timing is no accident; this is a young and inexperienced PM with no roots in the countryside. The farmers are testing him, using Attal to get at Macron, who, along with the EU, is the primary target of their fury.

In a bitter op-ed in today’s Le Figaro, one farmer, Anne-Cécile Suzanne, articulated this anger, accusing the EU of duplicity in imposing every stricter standards on European farmers while not applying the same criteria to the meat and cereals it imports from outside the bloc. ‘Tired of the inconsistencies, and of being the butt of the joke, too,’ she wrote. ‘Wanting to do better for European agriculture is all very well. But we have to stop importing just about anything.’

The farmers’ protests are spreading across France and they have threatened to step up their action if the government doesn’t act in their interests. The same goes for their brethren in Holland, Germany, Romania and Poland, all of whom share French anger at tax rises, non-EU imports and Brussels’ ‘Green pact’.

These grievances will be aired on Thursday when the EU launches its ‘strategic dialogue on the future of agriculture in Europe’. It had better be a dialogue. If it’s just another Brussels monologue, hectoring EU farmers to go green for the good of the planet, farmers’ anger across the continent will explode. No one wants that, least of all Gabriel Attal.