Is it nostalgia that seizes Marie Pochon, when the Europe Écologie-Les Verts MP remembers this day in September 2018 spent working on the balcony of the head of the environmentalist list in the European elections, then an associative activist? “I was at the RSA, Marie Toussaint unemployed, and at that moment, with the Notre Affaire à Tous association, we decided to organize the first Climate March.” A first in a long series of gatherings between 2018 and 2019, putting the fight against global warming at the center of the political and media agenda until two days before the 2019 European election. Everything was not going well so bad, and EELV had achieved a score of 13.47%; a surprise despite a favorable context. The day before the call to the polls, the candidacy led at the time by Yannick Jadot was credited with barely 8% of the voting intentions.
“The themes of the campaign are not ours”
The candidate knows it, the outcome of the vote risks, this time, being much less favorable to environmentalists. Due to a lack of momentum in the polls – Marie Toussaint’s list fluctuates between 6 and 8% in opinion studies – it is in this memory that their hopes of strategists and other environmentalist executives are placed. “The European elections are deadlines that take place much later than other elections, puts the elected official from Drôme into perspective. We have not changed anything compared to 2019, while the political climate has completely changed. We has a headwind,” she admits. But in politics, facing headwinds is one thing; boxing in a vacuum is much more damaging. And for the moment, the environmentalist candidate is encountering many difficulties in making her voice heard in the public debate. “It’s a campaign where the themes discussed are not ours,” whispers a campaign strategist. So here is MEP Benoît Biteau, also nostalgic, thinking back to the farmers’ crisis – a sequence last January when his party was nevertheless under fire from criticism. “We were given the microphone a lot. And we were able to develop our agricultural project, with concrete proposals that had until then gone unnoticed.”
To exist at all costs at the start of the campaign marked by the rise in power on the left of the candidate for the Socialist Party Raphaël Glucksmann (between 11 and 13% in the polls), Marie Toussaint continues to focus on her fundamentals. All its fundamentals, nothing but its fundamentals. Thursday March 28, the environmentalist candidate, accompanied by the boss of EELV Marine Tondelier, announced that she wanted to “retake strategic control of the highest emitting European fossil fuel companies”, by buying back the majority of their shares via the European Development Bank; “THE measure of the program”, as presented by his team. The head of the list took advantage of the centenary of the oil giant Total Energie to organize an “artivist” show – an activist artistic performance, well known to the green microcosm – on the square in front of the multinational’s Paris headquarters. “Producing more and more, you thought it would make us stronger, happier but we were wrong,” spits a faulty speaker. On social networks, the strange choreography of around twenty men dressed in black is ridiculed.
Because as too often in this campaign, the form eclipses the substance. Like the launch meeting last December, where some had little taste for the “Booty Therapy” session. And this question which torments some of the Greens: who does Marie Toussaint really speak to? “Every time she addresses structuring subjects, no one hears her,” notes an executive. Glucksmann defends human rights, Manon Aubry (LFI) the sovereignty of France. And we are personal development coaches.” “She is trying to establish a different relationship with politics. It’s interesting, but, in the current political landscape, is it easy? No. It’s even complicated,” breathes Sandrine Rousseau. If the strategy had the objective of making the candidate known, it is proving to be not very successful for the moment, challenged on the left by the notoriety of the heads of the lists already in this position in 2019. “There is a price of entry to assume, and we will have to try to raise its notoriety”, philosophers the MEP and former national secretary EELV David Cormand, while certain green oils are worried about a score below 5%, synonymous with disappearance in Strasbourg.
Internal swirls
If the prospect of a disaster scenario was not enough, the party has been stuck since the beginning of the week in the eternal “Bayou Affair”. Tuesday, the former national secretary of EELV returned his card after learning of the opening of an external investigation by the party following his ex-partner’s complaint for “psychological violence”. “A big stone in the shoe” for the president of the federal council of environmentalists Nadine Herrati. “If we start talking about us for the moral misconduct of Bayou rather than for the Europeans…”. A new angle of attack, for Sandrine Rousseau: “I think that Marie Toussaint must affirm that her project is also a Europe of equality between women and men.”
Annoyed by the situation, the candidate still tries to get some air. After having recorded several departures, among others the former MEP Damien Carême and the parliamentarian Aurélien Taché to the list of Manon Aubry, Marie Toussaint managed to poach Flora Ghebali. The entrepreneur committed to the ecological transition is presented as “100% Glucksmann compatible”; and actually tried to join him. If her inclusion in the list must still be validated by the party’s federal council, the former communicator of François Hollande at the Élysée and former supporter of Agnès Buzyn in the Paris municipal elections in 2020 is perceived, by her potential future running mate Bénédicte Monville, as “an influencer of bourgeois ecology”, symptom of a “centrist tropism” of the management. Some have even traced his family tree, to fuel an outrageous impurity trial. “His father, Eric Ghebali, is a journalist and businessman (indicted in the Elf affair), member of the PS, founder of SOS Racisme with Julien Dray, and close to François Hollande,” we could read in a inner loop of activists. If even among ecologists, we no longer show “gentleness”…
But the criticism brings us back to the existential dilemma of the party, and of its head of list: what place does popular ecology, for which Marie Toussaint claims, occupy in this very urban campaign? An unsuccessful attempt was launched in January, when she presented her European campaign against “povertyphobia”, a concept which had sometimes provoked ridicule on the left, including internally. Quickly, there are two months left to harmonize the story, to prove that we exist. And try, why not, to convince.
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