Jacques Serais, edited by Gauthier Delomez
modified to
2:13 a.m., March 19, 2022
President-candidate Emmanuel Macron was traveling to Pau, in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques, in a room facing readers of the regional daily press. He notably responded to a high school student who challenged him on the issue of the climate. Europe 1 followed the outgoing president’s trip.
Exchange exercises, confrontations in a room won over to his cause: no doubt, Emmanuel Macron is continuing his presidential campaign in Pau, in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques. Readers selected by the regional daily press interviewed him. Among them, Anna, an 18-year-old high school student in her final year. The young woman, who claims to be a feminist and environmental activist, challenges her on the climate emergency.
Emmanuel Macron brushes aside the idea of degrowth
“In the name of all the angry young people who find themselves in the streets. What do you have to tell us about the climatic and social storm that will fall on us?”, thunders the high school student. And Emmanuel Macron hastened to answer him, castigating the idea that degrowth would be the solution. “All those who say that we must stop what pollutes overnight in the face of the climate, I say to them very well: ‘Who finances your old age? Education? Nobody'”, launches the president-candidate under the applause.
The revealing slip of the candidate
The candidate develops his program. “We must help households to change their practice,” says the outgoing president, when Anna takes it up again. “This pollution does not come from the average citizen. We must take measures against”, adds the high school student, destabilizing Emmanuel Macron who then commits a slip: “And it is at the beginning of the last five-year period, of this five-year period, sorry, the mistake I made.” “At the beginning of the last five-year term”, a sentence that made the public smile, as if the president-candidate had already stepped over the election.
After this meeting with the readers of the PQR, the Head of State spoke by telephone from Pau with Vladimir Putin, sharing with him his “extreme concern” about the situation in Mariupol, Ukraine.