Finally the filming of the documentary on the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, France’s post-post-graduate school for those who want to run the country, is finished and I can settle into the editing and go back to writing this blog on a regular basis. I apologise to my regular readers for the long breaks, although I hope my new knowledge about the French elite will find its way into the blog.
On Friday, in Paris, I had one of those enriching conversations about the election with two people who at 8.30 I did not know but by 6.00 I knew quite well: my cameraman and the taxi-driver who ferried us about the capital all day. The cameraman, like so many others, has spent the last couple of months on the road with most of the different candidates. He follows them every day, watches more than listens, and never gets to talk to them himself, since he is simply the medium though which the message passes. But having spent his entire working life watching people through his viewfinder he is a pretty shrewd judge of what’s what. The taxi-driver, also accepted as no more than a means to an end, listens all day to his fares as they chatter on  about the election, watching only through his mirror. The cameraman had no time for Sarkozy, but, as a left-leaning person, was terminally disappointed by Royal, while Bayrou is too soft to succeed. Nobody likes a man who is half one thing and half another.
What preoccupied the cameraman was the environment, perplexed by the central contradiction that cutting back on emissions means cutting back on our way of life. At the mention of green-house gases, of course, the taxi-driver shifted in his seat uncomfortably, fiddled with the volume on his radio and tried to bring the conversation back to more reasonable topics, like the recent violence at the Gare du Nord. As the day wore on and we got to know each other better he did come up with the suggestion that a massive, taxi-exempt congestion charge in Paris would be the best way of cutting exhaust emission at a stroke, enabling him to work in greater freedom.
Just after Christmas, the campaign kicked off with great excitement and chatter about the environment – at that time there were four of five potential candidates representing the various factions of the ecology movement. That first surge culminated with a much publicized document drawn up by the charismatic Nicolas Hulot, a television presenter. Hulot challenged all the major candidates to sign his charter, in effect promising that if elected they would address in  proper fashion the problems of climate change. Hulot is a household name in France (not because his grandfather gave the family name to Jacques Tati’s cinematic persona, but because of the popularity of his own unpronounceable entitled  TV series Ushuaïa) and at that early stage of the election he had the clout to be able to make candidates bend to his will. But since then the campaign has degenerated into intense navel-gazing (well, that’s not entirely fair – the unemployed, the national debt, the economy generally are all important, but they are purely French issues, and the president is supposed to look beyond France into the greater abyss), with none of the main candidates talking seriously about Europe (the 50^th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome was greeted by silence all round), let alone the rest of the world. A fact which in itself shows France’s changing perspective: a few years ago it considered itself a weight in international affairs. So the silence on how France is going to fight global warming, for instance, is sad. Monsieur Hulot thought so too, and yesterday organised a rally in Paris to bring the environment back into the headlines – the only way to make the candidates sit up and take notice.
As the cameraman said, the reason candidates have dropped green issues is obvious.: de-polluting the atmosphere is in direct contradiction with increasing economic growth, both personal and national. Cutting back on green-house gases means cutting back on our wasteful lifestyle – all of us, not just big companies – and at every level. Next weekend the French roads will be choked with cars, admittedly most of them full, which makes a change, crawling off to holiday destinations because we have all come to assume that holiday homes a long way from our principal homes are a right. Airports will be full of people flying to further destinations for the same reason. But if people stop going on holiday, the hotel and restaurant trade will suffer, airlines will collapse, more people will be made redundant. But even in our working lives we all move about the country to an extraordinary extent, creating the wealth which France needs to get back into a situation of full employment. The French public know this, and may be the reason why the only Green candidate, Dominique Voynet, is scarcely polling 1% (Hulot decided not to stand, naively considering his charter was sufficient)
Last year university students took to the streets because the government seemed to be proposing employment measures that might reduce the style in which they have become accustomed to live by reducing the number of lifetime-guaranteed jobs. Learning from that, the presidential candidates have built on the assumption that everyone wants to have greater job-security and earn more money, so it is little wonder they have not, dare not, address serious environmental issues. It’s a choice we all have to make.
Hulot’s demonstration will bring the subject back on to the agenda of all the candidates, but it is now plain that none of them take it seriously. Like all their campaign promises, commitment to the environment is to be taken as gentle fiction.
 

This entry was posted on Monday, April 2nd, 2007 at 6:47 am and is filed under Political, Ecology, The real issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.