Pascal Perri is a geographer and economist. He is the author of the book “Ecology against democracy” (Éditions Plein Jour, 2016.) and hosts the economy program “PerriScope” every day from 4 to 5 pm on LCI.
Give in once to the opponent and you give them the opportunity to start over.
By capitulating in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, Emmanuel Macron and Édouard Philippe thought they would obtain peace from the brave.
A disastrous political error!
The Zadists conquered the rule of law for the first time and saw the weakness of political power as an encouragement to continue their occupation actions.
Valérie Pécresse, president of the Île-de-France region did not commit the same fault.
She appealed to the Pontoise court to obtain the evacuation of the Triangle de Gonesse.
A few dozen activists joined by political activists close to the parties of the radical left, rebels and environmentalists, had built wooden huts on the land where a station for line 17 of Grand Paris is to be built.
This rapid metro project aims to link the suburbs together.
It will avoid the effect
Hub and spokes
(the hub and spokes) which obliges the suburbs to saturate the lines which converge towards the center of Paris to then join another point of the suburbs.
It is a useful public transport infrastructure.
The Zadists conquered the rule of law for the first time and they saw in the weakness of political power an encouragement to continue their actions of occupation.
Pascal perri
In 2019, Emmanuel Macron announced the abandonment of Europacity's flagship project in the territory of Gonesse, a large commercial sports and leisure complex on a hold of around 280 hectares.
Insufficient for the Zadists who intended to develop an alternative agricultural project there (on land belonging to the land establishment in the region).
Gonesse, like other urban development projects, is at the center of a fight against development infrastructure that Zadists, ecologists and rebels qualify as useless and harmful.
It is difficult to understand the approach when it is no longer an airport but an ambitious “soft mobility” project and a remarkable public service tool.
The Zadists supported by environmentalists, as in the Nantes countryside, where José Bové, Eva Joly, Cécile Duflot or Michèle Rivasi have succeeded one another, are in fact leading a political fight against growth and against the market economy.
They are the false nose of degrowth in the name of a pastoral ethics of life in society.
Gonesse is only an intermediate stage.
The big fight took place from 2010 to 2018. It is there, on a few hectares, that the movement experimented with a strategy of violence and resistance.
During the eight years of occupation, neither the magistrates nor the gendarmes had access to the zone prohibited by the Zadists.
To prevent the completion of the development work, the occupants had trapped the grove.
In the words of a gendarmerie officer, they had made it
"a war zone"
.
In October 2012, the operation to evacuate the Nantes ZAD, known as Operation César, mobilized 1,500 police forces.
It ends with a political fiasco for the government of Jean-Marc Ayrault.
The Elysee and Matignon retain the arm of the Minister of the Interior Manuel Valls.
Bad pickax will then say the officers engaged in the field,
"a few more hours and we would have evacuated the area"
.
The Zadists are the false nose of degrowth in the name of a pastoral ethics of life in society
Pascal perri
The ZAD welcome all activists who have broken with society: decreasing, anti-globalization, Maoists, but also well-trained young people, breaking with society, except for the social income it distributes.
In Nantes, there were also illegal immigrants.
The ZAD is presented as a place of refuge for all the “damned of the earth”.
Look for the ideological substratum of the Zadists and you will find there the thinkers of degrowth like Yvan Ilitch, a former priest, who became a critical philosopher of industrial society.
It was he who had estimated in his time that the growth of the Thirty Glorious Years had been worse for the human species than the Second World War.
Read also: In the triangle of Gonesse, a ZAD to oppose the urbanization of land
