Paris (AFP)

Reassured by municipal officials who have strengthened its local roots, the right will have to take up the challenge of ecology, one of its blind spots, if it wants to convince voters by 2022.

"We have not talked about ecology on the right since (Jean-Louis) Borloo", the former environment minister of Nicolas Sarkozy between 2007 and 2010 who had carried the Grenelle of the environment, recognizes Damien Abad, the patron of the deputies LR.

The party came late on this subject away from its favorite economic and sovereign themes, especially since the priority of the past few years has been to contain the electorate's flight to LREM or the RN.

The Greens have even become a scarecrow, qualified during the municipal campaign as "madmen" in Lille, associated with the "red peril" in Marseille. The day after the election, the boss of the senators LR Bruno Retailleau warned against the "very communitarian tendency" of the ecologists.

Yet the professions of faith have multiplied since Sunday. "We can be on the right and carry strong environmental values," assured Mr. Abad. "We can be an ecologist and we can be on the right," added the president of the Ile-de-France region, the ex-LR Valérie Pécresse.

But the right refutes the "systematically punitive" vision attributed to the Greens, "with a succession of prohibitions, constraints, standards", in the words of former Minister Brice Hortefeux who quipped at the idea of ​​a reduction speed on the highway, considering not wanting to "be overtaken by hedgehogs".

"We cannot oppose ecology and production, and productivism in a certain way", affirmed in February the president of LR Christian Jacob.

Right-wing ecology therefore aims to be pragmatic, rooted in the regions, and carried on a daily basis by elected officials.

"I deeply believe in sustainable development," said the mayor of Meaux Jean-François Copé on Monday, defending "housing, travel, bike paths, food" or "the organic food program in the canteens" of his city.

- "Alternative ecology" -

Will this be enough to convince voters?

For Abad, the challenge "is not to green the project but to understand that political ecology does not concern only one party".

LR, in full ideological refoundation, launched a few months ago two forums for reflection on the subject, one on the environment and food, the other on agriculture.

"We are thinking about ecological taxation," said ex-Minister Eric Woerth, who pleads for nuclear power, on Monday. The parliamentary group will set up a "task force" responsible for the floor two to three months.

But more than a "race to measure", number 3 of LR Aurélien Pradié pleads for "a general vision" because "if you do not answer the question on the model of society that we want, you will never do compete with green people ".

The green push of the municipalities reveals above all, according to him, "a questioning on the economic model and the embodiment of a political voluntarism". And "we cannot give up on these voters", according to him.

Especially since the right is just beginning to recover from the electoral debacles of the last few years, and intends to embody a credible alternation during the presidential election of 2022.

"We will not build an alternative ecology without knowledge, without science, without debate and above all without man", affirmed in July the sovereignist LR deputy Julien Aubert, author of a "Green Book" of a hundred pages and a wind power bill that will be debated in the fall.

Because for LR, the risk is to appear behind a theme that even the National Rally took up at the Europeans in 2019, Marine Le Pen defending "localism" and short circuits.

The other danger is also to allow a dichotomy to settle between the small and medium-sized cities, rooted on the right, and the large metropolises voting for ecologists.

"France is already very fractured, it is not at all the time to have on one side a policy for the city and on the other a policy for the countryside", according to Mr. Woerth.

© 2020 AFP