The environment is the subject we were supposed to talk about, but we don’t talk about it in the French presidential campaign. And the presence of the environmental candidate Yannick Jadot does not change anything. In the largest environmental city in France, Lyon, RFI wonders about the absence of environmental themes a few months before the presidential election.
At the time of the Europe Ecology-The Greens primary, what was of concern was above all the personalities of the candidates, the radicalism of the competitors in relation to each other rather than a real substantive debate on the issues of the transition environment and the proposals for achieving it. And the least we can say is that once appointed, the environmental candidate Yannick Jadot failed to blow the wind of the environment in the countryside. It’s as if the climate emergency is on hold for election time.
Who to defend the protection of the environment?
Is Yannick Jadot’s strategy out of step with the spirit of the campaign? He refuses to go into the field of controversy, but suddenly he is not heard much in a campaign cannibalized by the themes of the right. Have the ecologists also overestimated their strength in the political debate after encouraging scores for Europeans and especially for municipalities?
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Lyon is the city delighted with Gérard Colomb by Grégory Doucet. One of the environmentalists’ slogans for 2022 is that 2022 should be the presidential election for ecology. But going from local enthusiasm to national momentum is not so easy, especially in the midst of the Covid-19 epidemic. The health crisis is crushing everything. And the concern about purchasing power does not help matters, because there is always in this debate the punitive ecology on the use of taxes to finance the energy transition and the idea that preserving the planet is not is not necessarily within the reach of all budgets.
Nuclear power, the gateway subject
So in the end, when the debate comes to the environment, it’s through the door of nuclear power because, to hear some people, how can we ensure the supply of electricity without it without causing skyrocketing bills or wind turbines that have become the symbol of a expensive energy which destroys the landscapes before being that of the renewable energies of the future. Can the hour of ecology still ring in the presidential election?
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