The French extreme right sees the conquest of the Elysee in 2027 as possible and is striving to achieve it. One of the strategies, already underway, is to build an alternative ecological discourse to that of the left, less maximalist and more pragmatic. The objective of Marine Le Pen’s party, the National Reunification (RN, formerly the National Front), is to expand its electoral base by fully exploiting a political and social rift that already exists between the rural communities – which would include the suburbs furthest from the cities – and the strictly urban world.
The thinking leaders of the RN and also of the Republicans (LR), the Gaullist right, increasingly close to Le Pen, are inspired by the success of the Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB) ??in the Netherlands.
“Can ecology be right-wing?” asked the magazine Valeurs Actuelles – close to ultra-conservative postulates – in its cover story a few weeks ago. The debate was picked up at the weekend by an ideologically distant medium, the newspaper Le Monde, which opened its front page with this headline: “Ecology: the new electoral doctrine of the RN”.
Right-wing – or extreme right-wing – environmentalism aims to act with common sense and respect people’s lifestyles and their short-term economic interests. He does not deny climate change and aspires to protect the environment, but he opposes what he qualifies as “punitive ecology” (sanctions, restrictions, taxes), practiced for years by the left, and the theory of economic decline as the only way to avoid the destruction of the planet. In reality, this approach comes close to squaring the circle and contains contradictions when it is put into practice, whether in the field of fertilizer use, wind energy or atomic power stations.
Marine Le Pen herself presented some ideas in this area during the speech she gave on the occasion of the May Day holiday in Le Havre (Normandy). The three-time presidential candidate advocated for “a much more effective and more respectful ecology with the balance between human activity and nature”. Le Pen urged imposing, in the face of catastrophism, “an optimistic vision based on faith in man and in science, in reason and action, in progress and innovation”. This trust that humanity, with its ingenuity, will find solutions that avoid sacrifices is called techno-solutionism.
Environmental politics already showed its conflicting potential in 2018 and 2019 during the yellow vest revolt. The origin of the protest was an eco-tax – of a few cents – for fuel. A sector of the population, the most dependent on the private vehicle, especially the rural or those expelled from the cities due to their high cost and who live in very distant suburbs, rebelled against a new tax that they saw as the imposition of the Parisian technocratic and bourgeois elite. It is these social layers, impoverished and tense, that are attracted by the discourse of the extreme right. They were opposed to the ecotax and also to globalization without measure and immigration without control.
The National Regrouping thinks that environmentalism, conveniently reformulated and with populist tweaks, can be a very profitable polarization factor electorally, following the example of the migration and insecurity debate.
Right-wing environmentalism will champion the preservation of the landscape – which is why it opposes wind farms – and the consumption of local products. The extreme right will present itself even more as the guardian of the essence of France, of the rootedness of its population, in the face of a philosophy, which they link to Macron, of promoting liquid society and “globalizing and free trade nomadism”. This scheme includes the promotion of small and medium-sized cities in the face of monsters like Paris.
The Republicans, under the command of Éric Ciotti, follow paths similar to that of the RN. Their convergence in the environmental field is similar to the one they already have with the extreme right in the migration debate. Some mayors of LR, for example those of Cannes and Nice, go even further and are making very aggressive policies, either for the extension of bike lanes or for cleaning beaches and protecting coasts and marine spaces. The message, once again, is that environmentalism should not be left in the hands of the left because the right is able to apply it more sensibly and at less cost to citizens and companies.
