Pretending that everything is back to normal: this is Sandrine Rousseau’s method of defusing discomfort. “I am very happy to go to work with my colleagues”, she slips in front of the microphones and the cameras, at the parliamentary days of EELV. Colleagues – the 23 national deputies, 12 senators and 12 European deputies from EELV gathered in Strasbourg on Friday October 7 – who are trying another technique to move forward: talking about the subject without pronouncing the names of the protagonists, Julien Bayou and Sandrine Rousseau, as does MEP Yannick Jadot. “We have to stop the buzz for the sake of the buzz. It is the objective of our work to respond to the concerns of French men and women on the climate. That is the duty of environmentalists. It is not simply to to agitate the public debate, to agitate the political debate.”
>> “It hurts us as much as it does us good”: Sandrine Rousseau, a media figure who divides the Greens
So to be active. The Greens have only one word in their mouths: “work”. The deputy of Val-d’Oise Aurélien Taché proposes an exit from the top: to draw lessons from the past two weeks to refine a common strategy against violence against women. Marie-Charlotte Garin [députée du Rhône] is working on a draft charter against sexist and sexual violence in the National Assembly. I am working with others on internal regulations for the group of ecologists which will make it possible to address these subjects. I would like us to be able to extend this within the Nupes. You have to put some substance into it. We need political objects.”
“We must give back a course, a desire, hope”, pleads a member of the management of EELV, won over by gloom. “I would like people to stop talking about us. I’m ashamed to go see the French at the moment, she confides. I don’t know which activist wants to go and distribute an ecological leaflet or even a Nupes leaflet.”
Morose, David Cormand is too. “Bullshit footage like that, I’ve known 10,000, I wish there were more.” But for the MEP, it’s time for the turning point for ecologists, when their lexicon finally finds the hoped-for echo. Sobriety, energy transition. “Everyone finds ecology cool. Everyone is for saving the planet, not killing fish and treating animals well. Except that we are no longer here to say: be careful, ecology is is important. We are told: ‘Yes, we understand that, ecology is important, we believe you. Now, make us want to put you in power’. We have to stop giving the impression that we yells at people, that we are angry with them, that we are boring and all that. The notch that we have to cross is that we are no longer there to be whistleblowers.
An emergency, at a time when two recent polls show that the left alliance has come out of the Quatennens and Bayou affairs discredited.