NANTES, France — François Hollande’s troubled relationship with France’s Green Party is about to get a lot more strained — just when he needs its support for a likely 2017 re-election bid.
The Greens, who helped Hollande get elected in 2012 but stormed out of his cabinet two years later, are furious that his government has allowed construction to go ahead on a controversial airport project at Notre-Dames-des-Landes, in western France.
Fueling Green outrage, a court in the western city of Nantes ruled Monday in favor of evicting 11 families and four farmers from land where the airport is meant to be build — a final step before construction can start.
Outside the courthouse in Nantes, families facing eviction told POLITICO they had no plans to comply.
“We will not accept it,” said Paul, a farmer who would not give his full name. “There will be people on the ground, we will mobilize our farmer friends, and we will go to the land. It is inadmissible to see the land torn up, land that has been protected for 40 years.”
The Vinci group, which filed the suit against the families, and Nantes town council declined to comment.
Green pressure
For Hollande, the start of evictions is a harbinger of further trouble with the Greens.
Ties between his ruling Socialists and the Greens have been dismal since they left his cabinet in 2014, mainly due to disagreement over nuclear policy, with ecologists accusing the government of backtracking on every environmental promise it ever made.
But if Hollande runs for re-election in 2017, he will need the backing of left-wing allies — and the Greens — to secure a majority.
Notre-Dame-des-Landes is an issue that could make or break the Red-Green relationship. Back when he was campaigning for president, Hollande vowed to freeze all evictions in the area until legal challenges to the project had been exhausted. He has more or less kept that promise — barring a fresh legal challenge before the Constitutional Court by families, which is unlikely.
Politically, however, technicalities do not matter. Hollande would have to give the decision the green light to send in police to enforce evictions if residents refused to go.
Footage of riot cops hauling families off ancestral homesteads would be grist to mill for the Greens, who are already calling on Hollande to halt the airport project.
The operation could also bring back memories of a 2014 case in which a young man protesting the construction of a dam in Sivens, a town in southwest France, was shot and killed by riot police.
The ruling “is a disaster for the families that were evicted, but it does not signal the beginning of the project, because without strong support from Hollande nothing will be done,” Green party spokesman Julien Bayou told POLITICO.
Valls or Royal?
On top of causing trouble with the Greens, Monday’s airport ruling is likely to force Hollande to choose between opposing factions in his own government.
Environment Minister Ségolène Royal, Hollande’s former partner and the mother of his four children, is a firm opponent of the new airport, while Prime Minister Manuel Valls is in favor.
Royal would have more to lose than Valls if a project deemed to be an environmental disaster were to be passed on her watch. A delegation of associations opposed to the new airport was seen entering the environment ministry in Paris last Friday.
Valls, on the other hand, has repeatedly said the airport would be open for business in 2017, even though the region already has an another international airport, the Aéroport-Nantes-Atlantique, just 30 minutes away by car.
Opponents of the Notre-Dame-des-Landes project argue that the other airport more than fulfills the needs of a region with less than one-fifth the population of the greater Paris region.
But a 2013 report by the Civil Aviation Authority said renovating the existing hub would cost about €600 million more than building a new one.
With bulldozers ready to start moving earth at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, Hollande is left with two options: side with Valls by coming out in favor of a project that will put hundreds of endangered species at risk and destroy 1,200 hectares of wetlands; or make a play for the Green vote and risk a backlash from Vinci, as well as the centrist fringe of his Socialist party.