Within Nupes, battle for hegemony for political ecology

Coming out of a summer that made everyone aware of the harshness of climate change, left-wing parties are still looking for the key to the success of political ecology. “Climate justice”say some, “popular ecology”, the others: so many words to reconcile the ecological project with a mass electorate. In this battle, environmentalists, despite their historical place on the subject, leave with a handicap: Yannick Jadot’s score in the presidential election, the failure of his attempt to reach beyond the middle classes of large cities.

In view of the European Ecology-The Greens Congress (EELV), several of the motions in the running for the direction claim to be of this “ecological class” that the sociologist Bruno Latour theorized with Nikolaj Schultz in his Memo on the new ecological class. How to make emerge an ecological class aware and proud of itself (Discovery). Ecology, a new class struggle, in which questions of habitability must replace questions of production. Marine Tondelier assures us, in her launch platform: “This “ecological class” (…) is much larger than the enclosed community. » But she remains elusive…

Carrying a competing text for the congress, Hélène Hardy regrets that “political ecology has not penetrated the working classes”. “We must not simply say but do: go towards, in terms of language, program, we must listen. » At his side, MEP Karima Delli evokes an example of successful synthesis, the ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, its “bobos and its rural areas”. Caricatured as elected representatives of metropolises, trams and bicycles, unable to speak to others, in particular by the communist Fabien Roussel, who had thus tried to stand out in the presidential election, the executives of EELV insist that they are the only ones to be able to carry the ecological matrix, while conceding their failure. “These fights, sometimes, we fought them without you”launched the ecologist Léa Balage to the “rebellious”, gathered in a meeting on Sunday.

“The climate is changing”

But at La France insoumise (LFI), no one has a complex about hypothetical intellectual property rights on political ecology. The former productivist socialist Jean-Luc Mélenchon claims to have made his conversion – “the climate is bifurcating, it is destroying all the production chains, so politics must also be bifurcating from top to bottom”he said in closing of summer universities, Sunday, August 28. He allows himself to scold a President of the Republic who does not understand this new software. “He is a very old man, Emmanuel Macron…”he said reproaching her for doing her “little smuggled Mélenchon” speaking of planning.

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