Attention, thorny subject.
By announcing on September 10 that he was planning to give up installing a giant Christmas tree in front of the town hall, Pierre Humic, the new EELV mayor of Bordeaux (Gironde) drew the wrath of many elected officials and citizens.
While the elected ecologist justified himself by saying that he did not want a “dead tree” in the squares of his city, a majority of French people disapprove of it.
According to an Ifop survey
(Editor's note: survey conducted online with a representative sample of 1017 people for Lemon.fr from September 15 to 16)
that we reveal to you, 76% of people questioned are against this idea.
Even more surprisingly, only 45% of supporters of Europe-Ecologie-les-Verts welcome the initiative of the mayor of Bordeaux.
The polling institute also questioned the French on the comments made by the mayor of Lyon Grégory Doucet concerning the Tour de France.
The elected EELV of the Rhône estimated that the big loop “continues to convey a macho image of sport […] and is not eco-responsible”.
Here again, the majority of French people do not follow him in his reasoning.
61% of the population does not agree with his analysis.
In his own camp, Grégory Doucet collects a little more support but only 54% of environmental sympathizers support him.
Political risk for environmentalists
Ifop finally asked the French about another shocking sentence that sparked a heated controversy this summer: the one pronounced in 2018 on a television set by the elected environmentalist from Paris Alice Coffin and which found itself on social networks after the resignation of Anne Hidalgo's deputy Christophe Girard.
At the time, Alice Coffin estimated that "not having a husband, it rather exposes me not to be raped, not to be killed, not to be beaten".
This time, the gap with the general population is obvious.
Only 11% of French people approve of what the elected official says.
And among those who say they are close to EELV, only 20% agree with it.
"These results show that the Greens sometimes make comments or support measures much more extreme than their own supporters", decrypts Jean-Philippe Dubrulle, director of studies at Ifop.
The opinion researcher believes that this could ultimately distract some voters from a green vote.
"Unlike the position of Yannick Jadot who tried to refocus the party, if some elected environmentalists start to push some of their proposals to the bottom, one can wonder if they will be followed by their supporters, wonders Jean-Philippe Dubrulle.
And if the measures they take pass for extremists, they risk being left out of the ground and shattering each other in the next elections ”.