The environment at the heart of Emmanuel Macron’s late mandate? In the usual Bastille Day’s interview of the French President, the head of state announced a referendum might be submitted to the French soon to list the fight against climate change in the first article of the Constitution. “The only question on which a referendum is possible – given the inquiries from citizens – is a constitutional reform, the one of the first article putting the goal of the fight against climate change and the respect of biodiversity into our constitutional text” Emmanuel Macron explains. He adds: “I am for it. I think this is a break-through”.
As for a date or a more precise question to ask the French about listing it into the Constitution, nothing has been officially announced. Anyway, ecology remains the central topic of the policy of this late mandate: late June, the French President delivered a speech for the Convention for the climate and ecology, explaining he will go “to the very ends of the moral contract” binding the government to the French, setting up 146 propositions out of the 149 proposed by this citizen convention. Questions that will be submitted to a “referendum from 2021 on one or several texts” based on these propositions.
“No country in the world has undertaken such a convention on complicated matters. And I, I acquired the conviction after the Yellow-Jackets crisis (…): we don’t want to choose between the end of the month and the end of the world” Emmanuel Macron said as for the convention. A referendum that could also include this constitutional reform.
