It is 4:03 p.m. this Tuesday, January 30, Gabriel Attal’s general policy speech should have been finished a quarter of an hour ago – a 45-minute speech had been announced. This is the moment chosen by the Prime Minister to “propose further accelerating our ecological transition”. But suddenly the tone is no longer the same: here no big martial declaration, no structuring measure, even less “You break, you repair, you dirty, you clean”. Who at this moment still remembers that less than two years ago, Emmanuel Macron, with his desire to address left-wing voters in the first round of the presidential election, solemnly decreed in Marseille: “The policy that I will lead in the next five years will be ecological or will not”? Was inspired by Jean-Luc Mélenchon to make his Prime Minister the one who would be “directly responsible for ecological planning”?
The president and, by extension, his head of government are serious burn victims. They define ecology first of all by what it should not be, that of “brutality”, that of “degrowth”, that of “scapegoats”. This is the only moment where, on this subject, Gabriel Attal still plays politics. Targeting environmentalists to give yourself a backbone in the fight for the environment is a bit weak. Agitating the nuclear muleta with all the more force since it was once denounced allows us to divide things cheaply.
“A French ecology”
“We do not do ecology against the people,” says the Prime Minister, who does not eat bread if he does not feed the countryside. You would think you could hear the president of the FNSEA Arnaud Rousseau who, Thursday January 25 at dawn, made a phone call to Christophe Béchu: “Our movement is not against ecology per se.” Above all, don’t be against it. How can we be against “an ecology of solutions”, better, “a popular ecology”, or even – the pompom of the pomponnette – “a French-style ecology”? In the name of pragmatism against ideology, ecology this time kills politics. Outside, the peasants hear you, you shouldn’t throw oil on bales of hay. History that his language tic does not spare the environment, Gabriel Attal goes for his concrete measure: “I announce to you that we will launch an initiative against plastic pollution, for the 50 sites which put the most plastic packaging on the market.” Then his emblematic measure: “Succeeding in the ecological transition is the challenge of our generation. This is why we will launch an ecological civic service, which will bring together by the end of the five-year term 50,000 young people ready to make a concrete commitment to the climate .”
The government has decided: on this subject, “LFI and the environmentalists dominate in terms of noise”, notes a minister, so there is no point in building a real alternative discourse, we must rather slalom between “contradictory injunctions”. Christophe Béchu, responsible, among other things, for the Ecological Transition, has examples galore: on clearing, essential for fighting fires but which some want to ban at crucial moments so as not to harm the reproduction of species; on hedges, which are so valuable in safeguarding biodiversity and which are now the subject of 14 different regulations… And the minister sums up the strategic line: “From when is the best the enemy of the good?”
The Europeans are arriving, with its two battles, immigration and ecology. On the first, the government wanted to bring out all the trumpets and drums, with uneven success; on the second, he plays low profile. “Yes,” said Gabriel Attal on Tuesday, “we will make climate rhyme with growth.” Not even a poor rhyme, just the hope of getting through the drops.
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