After LFI and the PCF, EELV announces that it will not go to the meeting with Élisabeth Borne. Ecologists refuse to participate in this “communication exercise”.
By Nathan Joubioux for Le Point
© AMAURY CORNU / Hans Lucas / Hans Lucas via AFP
Published on
Subscriber-only audio playback
” IEcologists will not participate in the Prime Minister’s meeting to help her turn the page” on pension reform. In a press release published on Saturday 1er April, Europe Écologie-Les Verts (EELV) declines Elisabeth Borne’s proposal for a meeting scheduled for Wednesday and thus joins the boycott initiated by LFI and the PCF. For EELV, “the way out of the crisis necessarily involves stopping the reform and resuming social dialogue”.
Marine Tondelier, the leader of the EELV party, as well as Cyrielle Chatelain and Guillaume Gontard, the bosses of the ecological groups in the Assembly and the Senate, refuse to “participate in the communication exercise” of the Prime Minister, charged by Emmanuel Macron to build a government program and a legislative program.
“The country is not ready to move on”
For the head of government, this meeting with all the parliamentary groups aimed to “appease the country” and “to dialogue with all the actors on the method”. But environmentalists consider this meeting “totally out of step with the extreme tensions” that cross France. Like Elisabeth Borne, they are aware of the need “to appease the country”. “But appeasement is not self-decreed, it is built,” they continue.
READ ALSOPensions: Borne is “delighted” to receive the unions
To explain this refusal, they highlight the recourse to article 49.3, “at the moment when the deputies were going to reject [la] reform” as well as “the disproportionate use of force endangering demonstrators and law enforcement on the ground”. Marine Tondelier explains that “wanting to turn the page” seems “above ground and disconnected from the state of nerves” of the French and affirms that “the country is not ready to move on. And neither do we.”
An appointment in “another setting”
“We have to do things in the right order”, considers Guillaume Gontard, recalling that this meeting takes place before the decision of the Constitutional Council on the reform, scheduled for April 14. For her part, Cyrielle Chatelain recalls the “consultations” already carried out: it was a question, each time, of “staged the dialogue without ever listening and moving”. She asks that “the new method must be embodied” in the facts.
Within the Nupes alliance, only the Socialists have not yet expressed their presence at this meeting.
Despite this refusal, EELV nevertheless wishes to be able to exchange and move forward. Ecologies want “an appointment in another setting with the Prime Minister to talk about maintaining order, the climate of violence against environmental activists and the necessary appeasement”.