Public session debates start in the Senate on Wednesday. The Executive also presents another bill on nuclear law in the Council of Ministers.
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A response to the “end of abundance” described by the Head of State. Wednesday, November 2, arrives in the Senate, in public session, the bill aimed at accelerating renewable energies (ENR). “We were going to live for all eternity with an energy not too expensive and that we mastered. Times have changed,” supported Emmanuel Macron in Saint-Nazaire (Loire-Atlantique), on September 22, promising to go twice Faster to develop wind at sea. There is an emergency, he pressed, to fill the considerable delay of France and to extract from the dependence on Russian gas, used by Vladimir Putin as a weapon of war.
Will the stewardship follow? Behind the scenes of the executive, the priority does not appear as obvious. Officially, the government negotiates harshly with all political sensitivities. The Minister of Energy Transition, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, consults all the groups since the summer. “It’s still meetings on the fringes”, nuances the leader of environmental deputies, Cyrielle Chatelain. “She did not even try to convince us, but to explain to us how we must think”, criticizes the deputy Les Républicains (LR) of the Haut-Rhin Raphaël Schellenberger.
The government has few illusions about the involvement of the right, which brakes on the four irons a month from the LR party congress. “If they think that the ENR will compensate for the deindustrialisation of the nuclear sector, they are all wrong,” crosses the deputy Annie Genevard, interim president of LR. The reluctance of the right to the assembly turns out to be harder than that of the Senate, while the senatorial right has already offered a taste of heated debates at the Luxembourg Palace.
An agreement with the left ?
Two amendments introduced in committee tipped the left towards the rejection of the text: a right of veto of the mayors, allowing any city councilor in the vicinity of an ENR project to oppose it, And the ban on establishing wind turbines less than 40 km from the coasts, in fact excluding projects off the English Channel and the Mediterranean. “This would be to reduce any ambition in terms of offshore wind turbines in France,” points out the chairman of the Sustainable Development Committee in the Assembly, Jean-Marc Zulesi (Renaissance). Dispossessed of its initial ambition, the government will strive to restore, in the debates in session, the spirit of the project to “hold the bar”.
Will it take an agreement with the left, we breathe in Matignon. And, in particular, with the deputies of the new popular, ecological and social union (Nuts). “We would have a majority that would be built on the left,” hopes an advisor to Agnès Pannier-Runacher. The relative majority will need to add around thirty votes or abstentions from other groups. Or three quarters of socialist and environmental voices … a challenge, while Emmanuel Macron favored the alliance with the right.
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