The head of the list of Ecologists in the European elections Marie Toussaint accused President Emmanuel Macron of being the one who placed Europe in mortal danger, if the policy he advocated continued to apply, during a public meeting on Thursday evening in Strasbourg. Judging him “accomplice”, even “author” of “environmental setbacks”, she asserted: “Yes Mr Macron, Europe can die: if we continue to apply the policy that you are calling for, this mix of naive liberalism , ecological inconsistency, and demolition of social protections.
She responded to the Head of State who had painted an alarmist portrait of the EU on Thursday morning during a long speech at the Sorbonne, which could, according to him, “die of itself”. “The power you speak of cannot be built on the pursuit of productivist chimeras which lead us to our downfall,” she asserted in front of nearly 400 activists and sympathizers. “Our speeches say one thing. But our purchases say another. In the first quarter of 2024 alone, France purchased 600 million euros of Russian liquefied natural gas, notably through contracts signed by TotalEnergies,” he said. she recalled, and “last year, we sent twice as much money to Vladimir Putin for his gas as to Ukraine for its defense.”
“Great speeches repainted green”
Believing that “it is no longer time to make big speeches painted in green”, she affirmed that the Environmentalists were “the camp of the big jump”, facing “the big setback”. A little earlier, the MEP sang, in German and French, the European anthem “The ode to joy”, in the company of the environmentalist mayors of Strasbourg Jeanne Barseghian, Besançon Anne Vignot and Grenoble Eric Piolle, numerous parliamentarians, and the leader of the European Greens campaign, the German Terry Reintke.
A month and a half before the election, Marie Toussaint is credited with 6 to 8% of voting intentions, far from Yannick Jadot’s score of 13.4% in 2019. We will have to “convince that climate change conditions all policies that we must implement” and “only environmentalists offer solutions commensurate with the crises we are experiencing,” she said. “We did not wait until 2024 to talk about ecological power, we did not wait for the war to say that renewable energies were peace,” also insisted the co-president of the European Green Party, Mélanie Vogel, defending the need for “a federal Europe”, facing the “fascist risk”.