By Jo Nova

Le Pen has weaponized ‘punitive’ environmental policies

In the largest turnout since 1981, French voters chose the “Far Right” unthinkable National Rally party in a record vote of 33 per cent. It is the first round of voting with the second on July 7th, but The Washington Post is already comparing the potentially “shocking” French election result with the 2016 Brexit win in the UK. The Guardian said the unthinkable has become plausible.

 The former presidential candidate railed against “Brussels,” which “forces you, almost overnight, to change your boiler for €15,000,” against the “authoritarian reductions to agricultural land” and against the “heartless European Commission.”

“Don’t they have as their objective the reduction of human activity as a whole?” she asked, before connecting the issue to her obsession with French people’s daily lives, a strategy that has brought the RN to the threshold of coming to power. “It’s always the same logic of degrowth, which leads them to ban the sale of internal combustion engines in 2035, and thus deliberately program the sacking of our automotive industry and dependence on China,” she continued.

Long downplayed or mocked, environmental issues are now a core part of the RN’s political strategy.

Pierre Haski, in the Guardian: “This is a real tragedy”

… I always had the naive idea that “reasonable” people, from the right as well as from the left, would never let them win. …I woke up this morning to a different country, one in which the Le Pen clan is at the gates of power.

We can also wonder why this country, with its many assets, has generated enough anger and resentment among its citizens to produce an election result that is more likely to damage its economy and social cohesion than solve real problems. We can also question a French political elite that was so blind it let the far right prosper in large corners of a society that felt forgotten and despised.

All of this is true, and is being discussed everywhere now in France, among friends, colleagues and in our family circles. Everyone is looking in the mirror and wondering what to do next Sunday in the second round. At the very least, we’ll have to learn to live in a divided land where the National Rally controls small towns and vast areas of rural France, while the “reasonable” people have the upper hand in major cities including Paris. This is a real tragedy.

Indeed, according to CarbonBrief  this is Marine Le Pens tragic manifesto — something about protecting the standard of living:

Original policy (in French): Rassemblement National

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