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French far-right National Front (FN) party's president Marine Le Pen
French far-right National Front (FN) party’s president Marine Le Pen Photograph: Ian Langsdon/EPA
French far-right National Front (FN) party’s president Marine Le Pen Photograph: Ian Langsdon/EPA

French National Front launches nationalist environmental movement

This article is more than 9 years old

Extreme right accused of inconsistent stance on environmental issues with the launch of eco-nationalist New Ecology movement

The launch of a ‘New Ecology’ movement by France’s National Front (FN) this week has been condemned by environmentalists as opportunistic and inconsistent.

The far right eco-nationalist grouping was launched by Marine Le Pen, with a ‘patriotic’ platform of opposition to international climate talks and support for France’s nuclear industry.

The FN has made political capital about cruelty to animals in the preparation of halal and kosher meat in the past, and its MEPs are preparing a resolution that would limit shale gas exploration, despite the party voting against a shale moratorium in the last parliament.

“The New Ecology movement is based on national interest and patriotism. We have to be closer to our people and not against our country’s interests,” the FN MEP and environment committee member Mireille d’Ornano told the Guardian

Marine Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, was a climate sceptic who once cut open a watermelon to illustrate how environmentalists were supposedly red communists underneath. But the issue of whether human activity caused global warming was “a very technical question,” d’Ornano said.

“We have to find a balanced position and we don’t have to be politically correct or ideologically biased about it. There are pros and cons to the scientific evidence. We have to find out what really comes from human activity, or doesn’t.”

The world’s leading climate scientists in the UN’s Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change last year said that the evidence linking human activity to global warming was “unequivocal”.

But d’Ornano dismissed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the international climate talks process, as a “communist project,” adding: “We don’t want a global agreement or global rule for the environment.”

Yannick Jadot, a French Green MEP, said that the new FN grouping was a sham.

“They never talk about biodiversity because that means respecting diversity,” he told the Guardian. “They oppose animal cruelty, but they also defend hunters and big agricultural industries. They pretend to defend fish but vote in favour of deep sea fisheries. Again today [Wednesday] they voted in favour of allowing Canadian tar sands in EU fuel.”

The FN also takes a strong stand in favour of nuclear power, which d’Ornano described as an issue of “national sovereignty”, although all the uranium used in France’s reactors comes from abroad, according to EurActiv France.

In philosophical terms, the FN was presenting idealised visions of a past natural order to mask the monocultural hierarchy that they would replace it with, Jadot argued.

“The extreme right say it was better before because we were all white and Christian - Catholic - and gay weddings were not an issue and we were somehow in a better relation with nature. This is now part of a fake image that they are trying to sell about the former order in terms of family, nature and race,” he said.

New Ecology’s launch closely follows a spectacular, if unsuccessful, campaign by ‘eco-nationalists’ in Switzerland to cap immigration levels at 0.2% of the resident population.

In Hungary, the neo-Nazi Jobbik party has campaigned against invasive flora from abroad which they say is destroying Hungarian plants and animals as it spreads unchecked.

The far-right Danish People’s Party is virulently opposed to immigration, multi-culturalism and multi-ethnicity. But it also pledges “to ensure that the way in which the earth’s resources are used bears the stamp of consideration, care and a sense of responsibility for the natural world and all its living creatures.”

With rising discontent among the young unemployed in France finding expression in the Sivens Dam campaign, and a traditional constituency among small farmers, Jadot said that the FN’s environmental tilt was not an isolated example.

“Clearly, there is a trend,” he said. “Five years ago most of the European extreme right parties were very different, but now they want to have power and be in governments so they have to widen their voting base.”

“I would warn people that they have no legitimacy and they lack credibility. They pretend to defend a cause but have no solutions. They should not be considered environmentalists or part of any Green movement at all.”

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