This "festive and combative" convoy, which set off Friday afternoon from the University of Talence, near Bordeaux, made a stop Saturday morning in Balizac, in the south of the Gironde, where it was joined by elected officials, mayors, deputies and senators of the villages crossed by the great railway project of the South-West (GPSO).
The activists denounce an "ecocide" project and plead in exchange for "the renovation and modernization of existing lines".
"They would like to force us to accept this project contested by public inquiries and by the Council of State, and permanently rebuffed, with the climate law and the law on biodiversity... There are a lot of lies, a lot of inconsistencies," Jacqueline Lartigue-Renouil, mayor of the village of Bernos-Beaulac and member of the collective of elected officials South Gironde and Montesquieu solidarity, told AFP.
On 7 September, the Environmental Authority, an independent authority responsible for issuing an opinion on each infrastructure project subject to an environmental assessment, requested a new impact assessment. "The answers for many items in the environmental code are outdated or incomplete," she said.
Participants, including elected officials, at the convoy against the LGV, on September 23, 2023 in Balizac, Gironde © Thibaud MORITZ / AFP
Consulted by AFP, SNCF Réseau ensures that its "teams are fully mobilized to respond to the opinion of the Environmental Authority and provide additional elements as soon as possible".
In January, a report by the Infrastructure Advisory Council had already recommended postponing the project, already delayed many times, beyond 2038.
"People are getting more and more up. And now, what annoys them even more is the taxes. It is the municipalities most impacted by this project that will have to pay. It's strong! And the Girondins will not even be able to take this LGV, unless they jump on a train that runs at 300 km / h under their windows. But they will have to pay for it. It's as if they were sentencing us to death, that they were making us pay for our own funerals," concluded Jacqueline Lartigue-Renouil.
© 2023 AFP