Of unity. Of the order. Consistency. This Wednesday, August 31, they were complete, ministers as secretaries of state, invited to the Elysée to make a sort of official return to a government seminar. Nobody was forgotten, to the point that the Murat room, where the Council of Ministers usually meets, too cramped, had to be swapped for the imposing village hall of the presidential palace. A way to show that the forty-two members of the government will be ready to face the weather of storms, that of climatic disasters, the energy challenge and the inflationary stress that is looming. And, above all, that they will do it together, in good agreement.
“We speak to do and to be useful, never to argue”underlined the Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, at the end of the seminar intended to fix the “framework for government action” and the sixty priority policies in a world “rocking”, where ecology is made a top priority.
After his words on “the end of abundance, the end of recklessness, the end of evidence” and a summer marked by repeated heat waves and titanic fires, the Head of State confirms that the world has changed. His jet-ski trip in the waters of Fort Brégançon (Var), in the heart of summer, lambasted by environmentalists, does not prevent him from drawing a course that is above all ecological, as he had promised it from Marseille, between the two rounds of the presidential election.
Witness the invitation made to Valérie Masson-Delmotte, member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), who has been warning for decades about global warming. She intervened on Wednesday to ensure everyone’s awareness; and she would have put “a good shake” to members of the government, reports one of them.
The scope of ecological planning remains unclear
But words and the awakening of consciences must now give way to deeds. For the time being, the site of ecological planning remains unclear. The energy sobriety plan, discussed for several weeks, will not be unveiled until the fall. And the “ecological radicalism” advocated by the Prime Minister has yet to materialize.
“There is a story problem”, observes Barbara Pompili, former Minister of Ecological Transition. For the deputy of the Somme, member of In common, a party embodying the left wing of the majority, “There is a whole chemistry to be found to sound the general mobilization by combining sobriety, the decarbonization of the economy, the development of renewable energies without forgetting the questions of purchasing power. Emmanuel Macron like the members of the executive are afraid of the faux pas which could set fire to the powder “.
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