For months, this place has punctuated its weeks. Endless debates between her relative majority and white-hot oppositions, close votes after negotiations on her bills, announcements of 49.3 when the situation freezes… Six months to the day after joining Matignon, could Elisabeth Borne pass this symbolic date elsewhere than at the National Assembly? On Wednesday, November 16, the Prime Minister presented her energy policy strategy during a debate without a vote.
A hot topic in the short term, with the explosion of prices and supply problems, due, in particular, to the war in Ukraine and the maintenance of several nuclear reactors. But also a long-term issue, since France has set itself the ambition of becoming the first major industrial nation to get out of fossil fuels. “We must therefore accelerate our ecological transition (…) and decarbonize our lifestyles and our economy”, warned the head of government. Before declining the three levers on which it intends to rely: sobriety, “because the best energy is the one we don’t consume” ; carbon-free production, thanks to nuclear and renewables; and innovation, with hydrogen.
Claimed this summer by the senators, who debated it on October 12, this discussion took place in front of a half-empty Chamber, where the oppositions played their part. The ecologist Julie Laernoes (Loire-Atlantique) criticizing “the eternal policy of energy intoxication” of the government and its “deleterious stubbornness” on nuclear. Olivier Marleix, the president of the group Les Républicains (LR), who has set up a commission of inquiry into France’s loss of energy sovereignty, castigating on the contrary “the abandonment of the nuclear sector” et “the dismantling of EDF”under the eyes of an impassive Prime Minister.
“We must no longer think block by block”
Energy will have been one of the major issues of the first months of a Prime Minister who is also responsible for ecological planning. Before a text on nuclear power and the vast project of the Multiannual Energy Program (PPE), two debates scheduled for 2023, the government will have a first legislative hurdle to overcome quickly.
Admittedly, the bill relating to the acceleration of the production of renewable energies was passed almost unanimously in the Senate on Friday 4 November. While France is the only European country not to have achieved its objectives in this area, LR senators agreed to reconsider two of their demands concerning wind turbines: the right of veto for mayors and the fact of postponing their installation until more than 40 kilometers at sea. But since then, some have regretted having given up. And the LR group in the National Assembly does not seem to want to be so accommodating.
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