After a summer of extreme weather, can France's political parties rise up to the challenge of climate change?
Massive wildfires in Gironde, the Landes and the Var. Back to back heatwaves across the country. Severe drought seriously affecting agriculture. This summer, the impacts of human-caused climate change have well and truly come to France.
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With only a few months to go before the presidential election, environmental issues are expected to take an unprecedented place in the political debate. Historically championed by the left, the topic has become inescapable, forcing the right and the far right to take it up.
Because today, "given the delays and the seriousness of the situation, France no longer has a choice: it must adapt, and fast", warns the Climate Action Network (Réseau Action Climat), which challenges recent governments, saying they "have not taken the necessary measures to adapt the country to the effects of climate change".
Yet the warnings have been sounding for several years. As early as 2013, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) stated that "warming of the climate system is unequivocal and, since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia".
"The years 1983 to 2012 are probably the warmest 30-year period the Northern Hemisphere has experienced in at least 1,400 years", the report also noted.
Are French politicians out of touch?
In a survey published on 24 August, Ipsos revealed that 64 per cent of French people felt "anxiety or fear" for the health of their loved ones and 48 per cent for their own health during the summer of 2026.
The polling institute also reports that French people "expect above all solutions from the public authorities": 79 per cent of respondents want government measures to help the population cope with heatwaves.
A study by the French Environment and Energy Management Agency (Ademe) published last year reported that 6.3 million French people were moderately eco-anxious. "2.1 million are thought to be highly eco-anxious, with intense, chronic symptoms" and "420,000 of them have mental health that is genuinely at risk", the study noted.
The problem is that they are not necessarily being heard by political leaders. "Most parties and presidential candidates seem out of touch with the realities of everyday life for French people who have been badly affected" by these events, says Anne Bringault, programme director at the Climate Action Network, speaking to Euronews.
"Faced with an unprecedented challenge for humanity and biodiversity, with the many deaths caused by heatwaves, the economic losses, particularly for farmers, homes destroyed by wildfires and nature dried out, the political response seems very timid and not at all commensurate with what French people expect or with their perception of the concrete impacts of climate change", she says.
Appearing on France Inter this Tuesday, Jean-Marc Jancovici, founder and president of the climate-transition think tank The Shift Project, was even more scathing, claiming that the political class is "in a form of denial" about climate change.
Politicians do not grasp the root causes of climate-driven disasters
A view shared by Eva Morel, secretary-general of the association QuotaClimat. "We have the feeling that elections are moments when ecology really struggles to find a way through", she laments to Euronews, before trying to explain the reason for this lack of interest. "In fact, they themselves are not encouraged to understand the issue and make ambitious proposals on it, because the media reception of their statements on the subject is generally quite favourable."
She goes even further. "Above all, we cannot hope for a constructive debate on the subject if, when climate disasters occur, we talk only about what is happening and do not try to understand the underlying factors – both the causes and the structural solutions that would allow us to address them", stresses Eva Morel.
She cites the events of the summer of 2026, which sparked discussions focused "mainly on observations and not necessarily on explanations". "So, for example, we talked more about climate, which was almost unavoidable. But we talked less about fossil energy", she regrets. "From there, we cannot really expect the proposals of the various candidates to be convincing when it comes to addressing the root of the problem", the expert continues.
What are French political parties saying on ecology?
"Which of the candidates puts at the centre of their programme the fact that the world is going to change? None of them", snaps Jean-Marc Jancovici. In his view, the programmes of potential or declared candidates for the next presidential election are stripped of coherent environmental measures. "You find inconsistencies everywhere", says The Shift Project's president.
For Eva Morel, this situation is explained in particular by how hard it is, in "a political system that rewards demagoguery, to ask candidates to confront a crisis that profoundly destabilises citizens' ways of life and still come up with a desirable project".
On the right, climate issues struggle to break through against traditionally popular themes like immigration or the law. "Right-wing and centrist parties stay in their lane, like Édouard Philippe who chose to highlight immigration issues during his trip to Mayotte", says Anne Bringault. Eva Morel agrees: "Even just on adaptation, the right as a political family still considers that it is not a political question."
In his manifesto, the former prime minister uses the word "ecology" only once. "We believe that this ambition requires the introduction of an effective policy to decarbonise our economy, preserve biodiversity and increase investment in the excellence of French energy and agricultural sectors", he writes, without providing further detail.
For his rival in the centrist bloc, Gabriel Attal, ecology for now seems framed more in terms of competitiveness and innovation than constraint. The Renaissance candidate advocates an energy mix combining nuclear and renewables and wants to turn climate transition into a driver of investment and growth. In early August, Attal also said he refused to leave the water crisis "to the left and the far left around Jean-Luc Mélenchon", promising to create a "ministry for water" if elected.
As for the left, "electoral opportunism, in a context of competition to harvest the green vote, seems to play a significant role", Anne Bringault continues. This competition is all the stronger as ecologists are struggling to appear united and to impose their line in the run-up to 2027, while the La France insoumise candidate seeks to occupy this space by putting forward proposals such as "eco-regions" or enshrining in the Constitution the principle of the "green rule", under which we do not take more from nature than it is able to regenerate.
"What we see is that, today, the environmental programmes of parties on the left are still more substantiated than those on the right, and that has been the case for several years", continues Eva Morel. "What we find interesting is the extent to which political discourse mirrors scientific discourse. And today, that seems to be happening more on the left than elsewhere."
National Rally are 'purely opportunistic'
On the other side of the political spectrum, the National Rally strongly rejects so-called "punitive" environmental policies and opposes wind power, instead making nuclear energy a pillar of decarbonisation.
The far-right party "is trying in haste to dress itself up in green by advocating simplistic solutions that are barely realistic financially or technically, such as widespread air conditioning", claims Anne Bringault.
"In fact, they focus on hot-button issues. And since climate is now one of those hot topics, they focus on it. It is purely opportunistic", adds Eva Morel, who acknowledges that the National Rally has rowed back on its statements questioning the IPCC's credibility or the reality of global warming, even if that "is not enough". "The problem is that their political software has not integrated the environmental question at all. They have no proposals that genuinely protect us from the consequences, let alone address the causes."
She also accuses the party led by Jordan Bardella of circulating, in her view, misleading information. "These are narratives that are deliberately orchestrated because they work with public opinion, instrumentalising moments that attract a great deal of attention. [...] It has been shown that this is an obstruction strategy that works. It blocks the implementation of public policies that are supposed to be effective", the expert explains, citing the example of low-emission zones.
"And what we fear is that, alongside this obstruction, there is an effort to disqualify political opponents and environmental defenders by demonising them. And by doing that, they push solutions away from the problem, even though the problem is highly visible", concludes Eva Morel.
