2023-08-13 06:00:06
Marine le Pen, in Saint-Pol-sur-Ternoise (Pas-de-Calais), June 1, 2023. CYRIL BITTON / DIVERGENCE FOR “THE WORLD”
From a political handicap – the environmental issue – can the National Rally (RN) turn it into an electoral asset? The far-right formation thinks so. She sees in ecology and the inevitable measures to adapt to global warming a major divide for the years to come and a subject of national division to be exploited, as she has done successfully for immigration.
By refining its environmental doctrine, the RN is seeking, as an executive of the parliamentary group associated with the discussions put it, to “wake up the fracture” between urban dwellers and the rural and peri-urban world, which constitutes the bulk of its electorate.
Until now, “localism”, a concept inspired by the extreme right of identity erecting the border as a dogma, was an almost unique element of language for the RN. The term should now take a back seat behind a “common sense ecology”which the party will oppose to the alleged punitive ecology. “The ideology [des écologistes], it is the fight against the human” argued Marine Le Pen on May 1, claiming a “much more efficient ecology and more respectful of the balance between human activity and nature”.
The concrete translation of this formula is as follows: the RN intends to oppose anything that threatens to disrupt the ways of life and consumption of the French and which is decided, in Paris or in Brussels, in the name of mitigating the greenhouse gas emissions and adaptation to global warming. On this model, the populist and agrarian party BBB (Farmer-Citizen Movement) is leading the polls for the legislative elections in the Netherlands in November. Same movement in Spain, where the extreme right of Vox is seeking the portfolio of agriculture in regional governments.
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Since April, under the leadership of Andréa Kotarac, adviser to Marine Le Pen in the National Assembly and co-founder of the microparty Les Localistes, around ten people have been working to produce, by the start of the school year, a booklet summarizing its proposals in matter. This group of senior civil servants or engineers – but no climate expert – also includes some elected officials from the RN, in local executives or in the European Parliament, and young activists. The objective is twofold, explains Mr. Kotarac, saying he works on mobility, energy, biodiversity, agriculture: “We are looking for general consistency because the environment cuts across everything. We had great ideas, we now need to translate them concretely into legislative proposals, into figures. The other objective is to propose a new reading of the balance of power on ecology. We have to explain why Sandrine Rousseau [députée écologiste de Paris] is not our friend. »
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