Wednesday evening March 16, on C8, a duel opposed two presidential candidates: Marine Le Pen and Yannick Jadot. We know that face-to-face debates are always high points in a campaign. For the candidates, they are an opportunity to confront their positions and their arguments. But this type of debate can also have perverse effects. Yet these are moments that everyone is waiting for. Two candidates who look eye to eye, confront their positions, raise their objections: what could be more exciting for the democratic debate.
These sequences are not anecdotal. They allow what is called, in political science, a pro and contra opposition, that is to say, quite simply, the head-to-head confrontation between arguments and counter-arguments. It is he who should allow us to form an informed judgment on political issues. And that’s what happened yesterday, on one subject in particular: France’s energy policy, which occupied most of the debates between Yannick Jadot and Marine Le Pen, but with an astonishing structure.
First, here is Yannick Jadot’s position. “Why do we pay very, very expensive electricity? It’s because we have thirteen nuclear reactors in France which are shut down. If we want to quickly replace the gas, it’s not in building nuclear power plants, it’s going to take us twenty years to do it!” Yannick Jadot continues: “Do you continue to invest in EPRs which cost 20 billion? It is not finished, ten years late, 20 billion… Is that your modern industrial project? You want to go nuclear, you want to cut the wind turbines? The reality is that your project put in place is the power failure in our country. Yannick Jadot’s position is clear: French dependence on Russian gas is due, in particular, to a failing nuclear power plant. It is therefore urgent to develop, to remedy this, renewable energies.
Marine Le Pen takes an opposite position. She even totally disagrees. For her, it is on the contrary the exit from nuclear power, particularly in Germany, which has created European dependence on Russian gas. “We will be able to talk about who created France’s dependence on Russia. By defending the end of nuclear power, by defending wind power, the model you are proposing creates dependence on gas and coal power plants.” She adds: “Notwithstanding the ugliness of what you propose, since I believe that you proposed 2,500 wind turbines that are 200 meters high! Or the Montparnasse Tower, everywhere.” You hear it: not only would the exit from nuclear power be synonymous with gas and coal-fired power stations, but, in addition, Yannick Jadot’s wind turbines would disfigure the territory. We are indeed facing a radical opposition, pro and contra.
And this is where things get interesting. To understand this, we must look at the structure of the two arguments. Marine Le Pen and Yannick Jadot agree on the objective to be achieved: get out of dependence on fossil fuels, both to preserve the environment and to ensure our independence from Russia. They differ on the way to achieve this objective: nuclear energy for one, renewable energies for the other.
However, what this opposition does not show is that there is a third way. We can absolutely consider that, faced with a challenge as immense as the exit from hydrocarbons, we will not be able to do without any low-carbon energy source, nuclear or wind power – this is moreover the position of some of the presidential candidates. Everyone will have their own opinion, or rather, everyone could have made their own opinion if the three positions had been represented on Wednesday evening. What we see appearing here is a perverse effect of the duel pro and contra: it presents a dichotomous structure. That is to say, it gives us the impression that if one is wrong, the other is right, and vice versa, by overshadowing all the other options.
As long as our political life was organized around two poles, the left and the right, this could still appear acceptable. But today, with a much more fragmented political space, these binary confrontations pose a risk to our public debate: that of being guided, even biased, by the programming of political broadcasts. It seems to me that this is something we should pay attention to!