On Monday, June 29th, in the immaculately manicured gardens of the Elysée Place, Emmanuel Macron staged an official reception for the 150 members of the Citizens Convention for the Climate (Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat ) to announce officially how he intended to act upon their multiple proposals for a greener France, a France that would bring official policy more into line with the overarching objective of the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change to keep the global temperature rise to less than 2°C by the end of the century.
The CCC is a serious initiative. The idea behind it was to involve 150 randomly chosen citizens of metropolitan and overseas France over 18 months in an exercise to define detailed environmentally favourable proposals in all aspects of everyday life, from transport to eating, from housing to farming. The citizens were assisted by experts in all these areas and were supported by civil servants and legal experts whose job it was to translate their proposals into draft legislation, ranging from amendments to the Constitution to regulations on food labelling. The proposals, in many areas already in the form of possible legal texts, are impressive in their range and detail. The whole report runs to 460 pages.
The question arises though as to how useful all this really is. Are the French really so far behind in their attitudes and behaviour on environmental issues that a citizens’ convention, with its overtones of the pre-revolutionary “Cahier des Doléances” is necessary as a guide along the virtuous path of environmental action? On the substance the answer is surely no. On the form of the initiative however, the answers are many and varied and all of them are political.
Over the 40 odd years I have been living in France, there has definitely been a slow but clearly perceptible move to greater environmental awareness in general, as the reality of climate change, both in the form of small changes in everyday surroundings but also extreme weather events in France and the rest of the world, have increasingly impinged on the national consciousness. At the lowest level, recycling of materials like glass, cardboard and plastic has become more or less a national reflex. In our building of 77 apartments, in a leafy western suburb of Paris, recycling bins and bottle banks have been in place for the past 15 or 20 years and most people, even among the reputedly undisciplined French, use them properly. More recently, at the instigation of one or two residents, a composting initiative has been launched. The local authority’s compost expert told us that this was the 400th such initiative for which he is responsible as he set up three large and sturdy crates in the grounds of our building, that about 15 families now regularly use to dispose of their vegetable peelings and the like. The residents’ association is about to request the extension of the building’s power network to accommodate charging points for electric cars and it can only be a matter of time before the first electrically powered car appears in the car park. More and more neighbours cycle to work (and can now be financially rewarded by their employers for doing so). A cycle repairer working from a well-equipped van now has a regular spot at the local covered market on Friday mornings. Locally produced fruit and vegetables can now be ordered from local organic farms and delivered to a pick-up point in town. In rural areas, street markets have always been a permanent feature of small towns and villages, but more and more city dwellers now prefer to queue up to buy local produce at markets or order it online than take a caddy round a crowded supermarket on a Saturday afternoon. In our holiday village in Southern Brittany, the local fisherman and the local market gardener attract far longer and more patient queues than any other traders on market days. The French being the French of course, the taste and texture of fresh, locally grown produce play a role but the idea that local producers of “organic” food “should be supported” can often be overhead in conversations.
In all these respects therefore, many of the CCC’s proposals are certainly not revolutionary and seem only to underscore and promote underlying trends in society that have been apparent for some time and to which the recent episode of Covid induced confinement and related restrictions have lent new relevance.
What is new however is the way all this has come to be reflected in local and national politics. Emmanuel Macron must have realised how lucky he was to be able to make political capital from the labours of the citizens’ convention just one day after the election of a number of green mayors to towns and cities all over France in the delayed second round of municipal elections on June 28th. Notably, and somewhat unexpectedly, in large cities like Lyon, Bordeaux, Strasbourg, Tours and Besançon. Indeed, it is the first time that, to the surprise of many observers, a green party, EELV (Europe Ecologie les Verts) in an electoral alliance with other left-wing parties, has managed to win power in this number of major cities. Six years ago, only Grenoble, among France’s larger cities, elected a green mayor and many considered his chances of re-election as thin. Similarly in Paris. Anyone who knows the city well cannot fail to have noticed the increasing restrictions on cars in the city centre since the socialist Anne Hidalgo, with the support of the EELV and the communists, was elected mayor six years ago. Despite highly vocal protests by all those affected, like taxi drivers and motorists driving into Paris to work every day, she was re-elected for a second six-year term, after promising even more radical restrictions on cars as well as more green areas and cycling paths. Her task was probably made easier by an exceptionally low turnout, a divided and ineffective opposition but also perhaps by the realisation, during lockdown, by those who actually live in the city, as opposed to those who only work there, that a Paris with fewer cars, noise and pollution is a far more pleasant place to live. In the same vein, the new mayor of Bordeaux, Pierre Hurmic, when asked whether he would soon be outlawing diesel-engined cars from the city centre, answered without hesitation that in his view a city centre was no place for cars at all. Exhibiting his newly discovered green credentials, the re-elected mayor of our Paris suburban town has very recently reserved half of the main road in and out of town for cyclists.
The big question now therefore is whether this support for green causes can gain enough political traction for a green candidate to have a serious chance of beating Emmanuel Macron at the presidential election in 2022. Barring major upsets, this seems unlikely. But there are also regional elections in the Spring of next year. They will be a third test in as many years of support for the greens and, in case of further electoral gains, another step towards national power. Before then however, the greens have three crucial issues to solve. The first is leadership. For the moment there are at least three potential standard bearers, Yannick Jadot, who was elected to the European Parliament at the head of a number of EELV MEPS last year, the current mayor of Grenoble, Eric Piolle, and even the socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, who, some think, could weld the disparate bits of the green movement together into a broader alliance. But that would certainly require some solid welding as, and this is the second issue, the movement has distinguished itself in the past more by its divisions than its ability to form alliances and build a broad-based left-wing political platform that the rump of the socialist party has singularly failed to achieve since the ignominious end of the Hollande presidency.
The third issue for the greens and their potential allies is the environmental credibility - or lack of it - of Emmanuel Macron and his government. Macron has always sought to present himself as a President fully mindful of environmental issues. Using the considerable powers of his position, he persuaded a popular environmental figure, Nicolas Hulot, to become his first Minister for the Environment, or “ecological transition” as it is boldly named, only to see him resign 15 months later after denouncing the power of “lobbies”. He then appointed another green politician, François de Rugy, but he was forced to resign soon afterwards over an expenses scandal in his previous position as Speaker of the National Assembly. Now that he has a new Prime Minister and a new government, Macron has appointed another former green activist, Barbara Pompili to the post. In addition, he is making as much as he can, as we have seen above, from the outcome of the citizens’ convention.
What is already clear though, reading through the convention’s report, is that anything very radical that could have emerged seems to have been quietly smothered along the way. No radical moves like an immediate blanket ban on dangerous pesticides for example, as the new Minister for the Environment, outspoken as she is reputed to be, has been forced to concede. Nothing more than vague aspirations for "better agro-ecological practices” and certainly nothing very tangible about issues like intensive dairy production or intensive pig rearing that has been responsible for releasing tons of animal excrement into rivers and watercourses for years, that eventually cause a proliferation of toxic seaweed on Brittany’s coastline. No big shake up either of the eternally underperforming and loss-making SNCF freight operation, riddled with restrictive practices and frequent strikes, that has shifted so many goods onto the roads over the years, in lorries that criss-cross France’s motorways and that could easily bring the country to a standstill, as they have done before, if the industry felt under threat. In other words, this is not the time, less than two years before the election of 2022, to upset big farmers, or the rail unions, or road haulage companies. And Macron will of course be keenly aware that whenever anything radical has been attempted in the recent past, like special tolls for lorries under President Hollande or environmentally driven fuel taxes for all in 2018, the “bonnet rouges” and “gilets jaunes” movements were the result!
Everything seems therefore to point to a continuation of the incremental and relatively uncontroversial path of environmental improvements, until such time as it becomes politically easier or more urgent to be more radical. Whether that will be enough to avert the environmental disaster that some experts say is just around the corner is another matter altogether. One thing the “gilets jaunes” protests have made painfully clear however is that when faced with the choice between “the end of the month and the end of the world”, as the saying goes, most people, for the time being at least, will choose the end of the month. In this respect, the ultimate outcome - and surely the ultimate aim - of the middle-of-the-road approach of the citizens’ convention is to give a higher profile to the environmental credentials of Macron and his government. We shall have to wait until the presidential campaign gets going in earnest in early 2022 to see if a majority of French voters are convinced.
