A new anti-green social movement is gathering momentum in France seven years after the Yellow Vests rocked the establishment.
The ‘Gueux’, which can be translated as ‘beggar, peasant or outcast’, held a series of demonstrations on Saturday at ports across France. The principal grouse are wind turbines, many of which are scheduled to be constructed offshore in the coming years. Fishermen are angry because the turbines will concrete the seabed, forcing them to fish further out and increasing their already hefty fuel bills.
Saturday’s protests were also supported by farmers, particularly those belonging to the Coordination Rurale union, whose members are mainly smallholders and resent the biggest farming union which is regarded as interested more in big industrial farms.
In a combative statement on its website, Coordination Rurale described the ‘widespread peasant anger’ at a ‘punitive ecology’. It accused theFrench Office for Biodiversity of pursing a policy of ‘harassment of those who feed the country every day’.
For a number of years an average of three farmers a week in France have taken their own lives. Earlier this month an elderly farmer in my village in Burgundy shot himself.
Saturday’s protests were low-key and peaceful. The Gueux are aware of how the Yellow Vest movement, which began in the autumn of 2018 after the government announced a new fuel tax, was ultimately undermined by violence.
There are two essential differences between the Yellow Vests and the Gueux.
The first is that the Gueux have the support of over 800 rural mayors who have formed a non-partisan collective called ‘Vent des Maires’, Wind of Mayors.
The second is that the Gueux have an identifiable and uncontested leader, which was never the case with the Yellow Vests.
His name is Alexandre Jardin, a best-selling author, whose films have been successfully adapted for the cinema. He first referenced the ‘Gueux’ in a tweet last December in expressing his outrage at the expansion across France of low-emission zones.
The 60-year-old Jardin is a writer with a social conscience. In 1999 he launched an initiative to combat illiteracy, and in 2014 he initiated a scheme to ‘repair the fractures in society’, which included supporting the unemployed and elderly.
In the space of six months Jardin has become the champion of the ‘little people’. His crusade against low-emission zones – which banned from urban areas cars registered before 1997 – drew support from people in cities and in the provinces who rely on their car for work. An opinion poll found that 70 per cent of French were against the zones. Politicians read the room and voted to scrap the bill in a parliamentary vote last month.
Emmanuel Macron is in the minority. He called the abandonment of the zones an ‘historic error’, and it is said that he hopes the Constitutional Court – whose president is a close friend – will overturn the parliamentary vote. ‘I’d advise against it,’ warned Jardin at the weekend. ‘We know he has a few friends on the Constitutional Council. If our amendment were to be rejected, it would run the risk of provoking a legitimate and structured movement of anger.’
Jardin has Nigel Farage’s turn of phrase
Jardin’s next target is Macron’s renewable energy policy, which he describes as ‘completely insane’.
Nearly 70 per cent of France’s electricity comes from nuclear industry and only the United States produces more nuclear energy. Jardin wants to know why the government intends to spend 300 billion euros on wind turbines and photovoltaic solar energy in the next 15 years. He claims it is a combination of furious lobbying from the renewable energy groups and the government’s ‘senseless mismanagement, for which we will pay’.
Jardin has Nigel Farage’s turn of phrase, an ability to articulate the anger roused by an arrogant elite. He talks of an ‘authoritarian eco-technocracy’ pursuing a ‘bobo [bourgeois bohemian] utopia’ and expecting the poor to foot the bill. According to Jardin, France is experiencing ‘a profound crisis of disconnection between the people and the technos who look at Excel spreadsheets and not at people’s real lives. We need to reconnect the people with their parliament and give them back their say.’
He hopes the ‘technos’ will start to listen to the people, for their own sake. ‘It’s dangerous to toy with the dignity of a people,’ says Jardin.
He was featured in numerous magazines and newspapers over the weekend. The media sense a story. Might France be looking at Macron’s successor? Jardin had wanted to contest the 2017 presidential election on an independent ticket but a lack of support (candidates require 500 signatures from elected officials to join the ballot) scuppered that plan.
That shouldn’t be a problem in 2027, given his popularity with rural mayors. Jardin was asked in a television interview last month if he was considering running in two years. ‘We’ll see,’ he replied.
Jardin as president isn’t far-fetched. Who could have imagined in 2015 that within two years a boyish former banker with barely any political experience would be elected to the Elysee?
To coincide with the launch of his presidential bid in 2016, Macron released a book entitled Revolution in which he envisioned transforming France into a Start-Up Nation. Jardin published his manifesto in March called Les Gueux. He also dreams of a peaceful revolution: a Start Again nation.
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