The defeat of Cécile Duflot in the first round is that of a vision of ecology that is guilt-inducing and moralizing, which has even tired the activists. The European deputy Yannick Jadot, the favorite to represent the party in the presidential elections, advocates for a “friendly ecology.”
Few were saddened by Cécile Duflot’s defeat in the first round of the ecological primary.
Symbolizing the party representatives who participated in the current government’s administrations before choosing to leave the majority, the former minister is representative of the political formation’s failure. The two qualified candidates, two European deputies, Yannick Jadot and Michèle Rivasi, are not well known to the general public but are more appreciated by activists and promise new perspectives for the movement.
“Rightly or wrongly, the former minister Cécile Duflot has often been associated by her detractors with this ‘punitive ecology,’ an expression she refuted, describing it as a ‘nonsense.’ ‘Is it not punitive to breathe in fine particles? Today, what is punitive is the pollution,’ she retorted in May 2015 while defending the principle of the heavy vehicle ecotax,” comments the LCI channel.
Paradoxically, the party is in one of its worst phases just as a five-year term, which began with a majority alliance, comes to an end. EELV has not become a popular party, achieving respectable scores only in large cities.
Convert the French to ecology, do not scare them
But for Yannick Jadot, what matters now is to convert the French smoothly: by talking to them about these “hundreds of thousands of jobs” promised by the energy transition, and about “the thousands of SMEs that are already in ecology.”
Politically, it is also a way to end the Cécile Duflot era, who led EELV before becoming Minister of Housing, then deputy.
