Climate can wait: French election campaign ignores ‘humanity’s greatest challenge’

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has upended the race for the Élysée Palace, forcing presidential hopefuls into embarrassing U-turns just weeks ahead of the April 10 vote, and meaning that topics already suffering from underexposure have fallen by the wayside.

One prominent casualty is the plight of French hospitals, pushed to the limit by the Covid-19 pandemic; another is the looming climate catastrophe that, in the long run, is set to cause even greater devastation.

In its latest report, published on February 28, the United Nations climate science panel warned that climate change is already disrupting billions of lives and that governments’ failure to rein in planet-warming carbon emissions amounted to a “criminal abdication of leadership”. Far from impacting the French campaign, the IPCC’s dire warnings went largely unnoticed.  

The following week, climate-related issues accounted for just 1.5% of the time dedicated to the election on French media, according to a tally by the advocacy group L’Affaire du siècle (The Case of the Century), which famously – and successfully – sued the French state for climate inaction last year.

“When you know just how much is at stake, it’s crazy to witness this level of climate denial coming from both candidates and the media,” said Cécile Duflot, a former Green Party leader and current head of Oxfam France, one of the charities behind the Affaire du siècle.

“A number of candidates avoid talking about climate change because it’s a complex subject. But journalists also prefer to discuss other issues,” Duflot told FRANCE 24. “Climate and the environment are never discussed during political programmes; and when they do get a mention, they’re treated as a side issue, at the very end of the show. It was like this even before the war in Ukraine.”

‘No climate, no mandate’

Prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, environmental issues had already been crowded out by talk of the far right’s preferred topics, most notably immigration and crime. The trend was most apparent on 24-hour news channels, some of which have been accused of pushing the likes of Eric Zemmour, a former pundit who has two convictions for hate speech and is appealing a third.

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According to Duflot, news outlets tend to bypass climate-related issues on the grounds that they “foster anxiety” and “don’t interest the French”. Voter surveys, however, point to the contrary.

Pollsters have regularly found that climate change ranks among voters’ main preoccupations, second only to purchasing power and, more recently, the war in Ukraine. An Ipsos survey in early February found that 94% of respondents considered climate change to be a “critical” issue and 47% said it should be a “priority” for the next president.

Since the start of the year, activists, scientists and environmental journalists have published a flurry of articles calling for the climate emergency to be pushed up the agenda. 

In a February op-ed published by state broadcaster Franceinfo, more than 1,400 climate experts expressed their “alarm at the lack of democratic debate on the great upheavals that are underway or yet to come, whether they affect climate, oceans, biodiversity or pollution.” Days later, the Affaire du siècle issued a fresh call to action on French daily Le Monde, under the slogan “No climate, no mandate”.

Far from sidelining environmental issues, contemporary upheavals – from the pandemic to the war in Ukraine – only highlight the need to tackle the climate emergency, said Oxfam’s Duflot.

“In retrospect, we can see how contemporary crises are linked to the issues of our continued reliance on fossil fuels, the outsourcing of essential industries, food sovereignty and energy independence,” she said. “By debating global warming and the environment, we can provide answers to all these problems.”

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On Saturday, tens of thousands of demonstrators carried precisely that message as they rallied in towns and cities across France under the slogan “Paix, climat, même combat” (Peace and climate, one and the same struggle). 

“Vladimir Putin’s criminal regime is financed, in large part, through our dependence on fossil fuels,” said Lorette Philippot of the NGO Amis de la Terre France, one of 500-plus associations organising the rallies. She added: “Ending our fossil fuel consumption is crucial both for the climate and a more stable planet.”

Debate of the century

Dismay at the lack of visibility afforded to environmental issues featured prominently at the marches, whose organisers blasted a campaign that “blithely ignores the greatest menace humanity has ever faced”.

Stressing mainstream media’s failure to address the issue, the Affaire du siècle decided to organise its own debate on Sunday, grilling five of the 12 presidential candidates on their proposals for the environment during a three-hour programme aired on the live-streaming platform Twitch. 

Hoping to accommodate President Emmanuel Macron, who has refused to spar with his challengers in the run-up to the April 10 vote, organisers of the “Débat du siècle” (debate of the century) opted to grill each candidate in turn for 30 minutes rather than hold a traditional debate – though the incumbent president still declined to take part. 

They also chose not to invite far-right candidates, including Zemmour and Marine Le Pen, whose principal contribution to the environmental debate has been to rail against wind farms for “wrecking the French countryside”.

The five remaining participants still covered a broad spectrum, ranging from conservative nominee Valérie Pécresse to Trotskyist candidate Philippe Poutou. While the former touted her plans to invest heavily in electric cars, preferring incentives to “punitive ecology”, the latter pledged to “expropriate” large agribusinesses and put “small-scale farmers” in control of the land.

Meanwhile, Communist Party candidate Fabien Roussel was quizzed on his habit of praising beef steaks on the campaign trail – to which he answered: “we must eat less (meat) but of better quality, that is made in France, in accordance with sanitary guidelines and respecting the environment.”

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Warning that the transition to a green economy would not be “painless”, Green candidate Yannick Jadot said he was prepared to delay his plans to replace nuclear power with renewable energy sources in order to “absorb the fallout from the war in Ukraine”. Whether it takes “20 years or 25”, the important thing is to get it done, he said.

Like Socialist nominee Anne Hidalgo, Jadot said he would introduce a crime of “ecocide” to punish serious cases of environmental pollution. Both candidates also promised to step up incentives to foster organic farming, help young workers move to rural areas, and revive regional rail networks – all of which begged the question of why they failed to agree on a common platform in the first place.

Their main challenger on the left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, was a surprise absentee, having cancelled his attendance at the last minute. But in a sign that the Débat du siècle had succeeded in drawing attention, organisers later said they would grant the leftist firebrand a second session on Wednesday – and a second chance to carve out a little space for climate in the campaign.