We remember that this same room, the Zénith de Paris, had been particularly cruel to Valérie Pécresse, at the start of her campaign. But Sunday March 27, the spectators were present, Yannick Jadot was very applauded, his speech had rhythm, in short, it was an effective meeting. A rather successful exercise indeed it seems to me, and yet, it was not self-evident! This meeting was for the environmentalist candidate the opportunity to present his program with a word that came up very often: “We assume it / We know / We know / We environmentalists / We are the only ones / We will propose, […] We will accompany them.”
Yannick Jadot speaks in the first person plural. So, nothing very surprising, you will say to me, and yet: a few months ago now, I had the opportunity to underline how much the ecologist candidate tended to use a first person singular with insistent repetition, the famous “me, I”. So his rhetoric has evolved. He has made the collective nature of the project he defends consistent with his way of expressing himself. Yannick Jadot presented concrete measures and underlined the many disagreements which oppose him to Emmanuel Macron. But he also used other kinds of words. “Movement, hope, innovation, audacity are ecologists. / That’s the ecologist vote. The ballot, life, climate and social justice. / A project of humanism, a project of openness, a project of solidarity, in short a project of civilisation.”
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There you have it, so we know the basis of his political philosophy: movement, hope, innovation, audacity, social justice, openness, solidarity, humanism, harmony, and even life. It’s beautiful. It’s beautiful, but the problem is that it doesn’t mean anything. You have recognized them, all of these are mobilizing concepts, hollow, empty words, but with positive connotations, which please everyone without saying anything concrete to anyone. So, it is normal, and even inevitable, to find some scattered throughout the speech, especially this type of large meeting dedicated to arousing the enthusiasm of the crowd. But all the same: there, these are beautiful skewers!
Concrete proposals and mobilizing concepts, for the moment, all this remains very classic. However, there is one thing that was out of the ordinary. Over the 70 minutes of the speech, there is one sentence in particular that we had the impression of hearing…several times. “The stronger we are on April 10, the stronger you will be, and the stronger climate and life will be. / The stronger we will be on April 10, the stronger you will be, the stronger climate and justice will be. / The stronger we will be strong on April 10, the stronger you will be, the more the climate and the life / And the stronger this life-building movement will be.”
Four times the same sentence! So, let’s be clear, this is neither a coincidence nor a blunder, but a choice. We have to believe that there is an important element of discourse here for Yannick Jadot, and indeed: it simply tells us about the strategy and, even, the future of the environmental candidate.
“The stronger we are on the evening of April 10, the stronger the climate and life will be.” April 10 is the first round of the election. You will notice that Yannick Jadot says absolutely nothing about the second round, even less about a possible victory. He therefore confesses to us, implicitly, that he no longer has any hope of winning the presidential election. So, given the intention to vote surveys, this is not shocking news. But, coming from the candidate himself, it’s still an astonishing admission.
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Why, then, would we vote for a candidate who contemplates his own defeat? He tells us so himself: so that “ecology be stronger”. But what does that mean? Stronger…compared to what? We understand it well in hollow: stronger compared to the other formations of left, in the perspective, one imagines it, of the political recomposition which will follow the election. Obviously for Yannick Jadot, it is indeed the 2027 campaign which began on Sunday.