A former advisor to President Emmanuel Macron has warned that if France continues down the same path with the green agenda, the country will likely face a “social revolt” far greater than the Yellow Vest movement or the recent bout of farmer protests.
“It’s going to end very badly,” warned David Djaïz in an interview this week with the Paris-based conservative news magazine Le Point.
The left-wing public intellectual and Emmanuel Macron’s former rapporteur for the government’s National Council for Refoundation (CNR) accused the government and political elites in France of being “content to manage the decline”.
Djaïz, an ardent believer in the need for a green transition of the economy in France and in Europe as a whole, argued that there is a “deficit of strategic thinking” in the halls of power, saying: “I saw from the inside how intellectually and operationally the state was exhausted.”
“This is going to end very badly. France could experience a huge public finance crisis, or a social revolt compared to which the Yellow Vests and the farmers are appetizers,” he warned.
Populist uprisings have been a defining feature of the government of Macron, a former Rothschild banker who has been branded as the “president of the rich“.
In 2018, the Yellow Vest movement — Named after the yellow safety vests French motorists are required to keep in their vehicles — threw the country into chaos as hundreds of thousands protested for months against Macron’s attempts to impose burdensome carbon taxes, which would have had a disproportionate impact on the working-class people, particularly commuters.
More recently, weeks of farmer protests shut down major highways throughout France amid a Europe-wide uprising against the Green New Deal agenda, globalist free trade schemes, and mountains of regulations and paperwork threatening the ability of farmers throughout the bloc to stay in business.
The elitist green agenda, alongside economic stagnation and mass migration, are set to be the driving factors as voters in EU nations head to the polls in June to select the next European Parliament, with populists taking up the cause of the farmers, including National Rally President Jordan Bardella in France, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and Dutch election winner Geert Wilders.
The growing public anger over the failures of the green agenda recently forced Brussels into abandoning the long-anticipated Nature Restoration plan, which looks to prevent around a fifth of the bloc’s land from being used for agriculture. The EU government has also had to backtrack on Ukrainian access to the market in order to appease the farmers.
For Djaïz, the approach taken by France and Europe as a whole during Macron’s tenure as one of its leading figures has alienated the public with the burdens of the green agenda being disproportionately placed on the working classes through stifling regulations and regressive taxation schemes.
The former civil servant argued in his latest book, La Révolution Obligée (The Necessary Revolution), that green proponents in Europe should focus less on restrictions but rather on building up Europe’s industrial base, such as battery factories, in order to compete with the likes of Communist China and the United States.
“Europe is far behind… Today, China controls the entire electric battery chain, it is flooding Europe with electric cars. There is an urgent need to rearm on an industrial level,” he said in February.
Some have suggested that this more economic populist-oriented approach could be a blueprint for a future centre-left coalition after President Macron’s second and final term comes to an end in 2027 with no clear successor in place, with the possible exception of political neophyte Gabrial Attal, who was installed earlier this year as Macron’s prime minister.
The photogenic and well-spoken Djaïz has also been pointed to as a potential leader of such a political movement. However, the 33-year-old may have to wait for some time if he hopes to ascend to the Élysee Palace, with many predicting that the growing anger over Macron’s neo-liberal governance potentially leading to an opening for populist National Rally firebrand Marine Le Pen to finally break through and become president.
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