2024 was not only the year of an unprecedented political crisis in France, triggered by the dissolution of the Assemblée Nationale, and marked by the paralysis of the country, the fragmentation of the political landscape and the extreme polarization of opinions. It also confirmed the near-total disappearance of environmental issues from the political agenda. The latest government’s composition is revealing in this respect: While the environment minister, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, was kept in office, and moved down from ninth to 12th in the government’s protocol order, climate disappeared from her title and she lost energy issues from her portfolio. Recall that, in 2017, the first holder of the position under President Emmanuel Macron, Nicolas Hulot, was given the honorific title of minister of state, third in the government’s protocol order. The backsliding since then illustrates the ebbing presence of environmental concerns over the past seven years – in the halls of power, and, by contagion, in the public conversation and society.
The watchwords have subtly shifted. On the climate front, there’s increasing talk of “adaptation”: this is, implicitly, nothing more than a way of accepting that thermo-industrial society and the earth’s climate remain on a collision course, and that we’ll have to deal with the resulting shock. On other issues linked to the environment – health, biodiversity, pollution, etc. – successive governments no longer even pay the usual declarative and polite lip service. We no longer bother to pretend; the order of priorities has been established.
Widening the focus, looking outside France, doesn’t offer a very different picture: Quite the contrary, in fact. The far right’s capture of major media outlets and social media platforms; the European Parliament and Commission’s rightward shift; the return of war to the European continent and the arrival of a form of unabashed neo-fascism in the White House, no doubt all mark the beginning of a long period of relegation and neglect of the environmental issue.
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