Gilles Clavreul is co-founder of Printemps republican and general delegate of the L'Aurore think tank. He was interministerial delegate for the fight against racism and anti-Semitism from 2015 to 2017.
The deliberation adopted by the Strasbourg city council, providing for funding of more than € 2.5 million for the construction of the “
Eyyub Sultan
”
mosque
, carried by the Turkish Islamist organization Milli Görüs, sheds new light on ecologism municipal, seven years after the election of Eric Piolle in Grenoble and especially nine months after the victories won by the candidates Europe Ecology - The Greens (EELV) in Lyon, Strasbourg, Bordeaux, Besançon and Poitiers.
Until now, the hazardous outings of Gregory Doucet (Lyon) against the Tour de France or his Bordeaux counterpart Pierre Hurmic, renouncing the traditional Christmas tree, could have given rise to a smile.
With the Strasbourg decision, contested by all political groups including the Socialists, who are nevertheless part of the majority, environmentalists affirm a political choice with serious consequences for Strasbourg, but also for themselves at the national level, and by extension for the left as a whole.
Being part of the organizations which refuse to sign the charter of Islam of France drawn up within the CFCM, its representatives are on the front line to defend Erdogan's positions.
For Strasbourg, although the EELV majority denies it, this decision marks a break.
Admittedly, an already old practice in this concordance city provides for financial support for religious projects of up to 10% of the work.
However, this is a faculty and not a right, a maximum and not a lump sum, within the framework of a negotiation which begins before the start of the work.
However, the first stone of the Eyyub Sultan Mosque was laid in October 2017, in the presence of a member of the Turkish government.
In the meantime, the cost of the works has slipped, causing a doubling of the initial budget.
Former mayor Roland Ries was then categorical: no municipal funding for a project started.
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Finally, such an amount had never been granted for a project of this nature.
2.5 M € without any guarantee on the co-financing, it was so big that the municipal team had to revise its deliberation at the last minute to condition the city's aid to the production of a credible financing plan.
It is therefore by going it alone, and by showing a certain lightness in the allocation of public funds, that the ecological majority offers Erdogan a substantial windfall for an achievement intended to affirm the influence of Turkish Islamism, an inseparably political project. and religious, in the heart of the European capital.
Founded by former Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, Milli Görüs (“
national vision
”) is one of the vectors of Turkish politico-religious influence in Europe.
Being part of the organizations which refuse to sign the charter of the Islam of France drawn up within the CFCM, its representatives are on the front line to defend the aggressive positions of Erdogan against France, accused of "
Islamophobia
".
For the European capital of human rights, it is a strange symbol;
especially when Ankara is withdrawing from the Istanbul convention against violence against women!
In other words, environmentalists from Strasbourg are making a substantial gift to one of the flagships of the Islamist offensive in Europe.
For the European capital of human rights, it is a strange symbol;
especially when Ankara is withdrawing from the Istanbul convention against violence against women!
It is difficult to see how this decision could remain inconsequential at the national level, as it confirms a more general inflection, not to say a change of course, in political ecology as embodied and practiced by Europe Écologie Les Verts.
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On the one hand, it considerably hardens the image of a political formation rather associated, historically, with a libertarian and feminist state of mind, hardly compatible with bigotry wherever it comes from;
on the other hand, it will seriously complicate already strained relations with other leftist formations, not only the Socialist Party which is increasingly re-anchored in its secular and universalist tradition, but also with the Communist Party, which voted against municipal deliberation, even with rebellious France, hostile to the Concordat.
In short, already weakened by the tensions between Anne Hidalgo and the green group in Paris and by the absence of agreements for the regional ones, except in Hauts-de-France, dreams of reconstituting the "
plural left
" are in danger of collapsing. smash against the wall of growing ideological incompatibilities between its various components.
Two irreconcilable lefts?
At least two, and more likely more.
If environmentalists allow themselves to be caught up by their old demons, their ambition to recompose the left around them, or even to rule the country one day, is likely to come to an end.
For the political observer, what this new municipal ecology is showing is also an object of perplexity: if we disregard the very specific conditions of the vote of March / June 2020, it is not sure that the he electorate which has brought its teams to responsibilities, which we guess young, integrated and graduated, inevitably finds its account in this new ideological software, moreover very composite, between "
decreasing
"
philosophy
which draws from the sources of social Christianity, modernism and voluntarism displayed in terms of transport, food or urban planning, and the return to a certain radicalism of the extreme left.
Especially if it is to cut short a nationalist, authoritarian and religious dictatorship like that of Erdogan.
In short, if the environmentalists allow themselves to be caught up by their old demons - what one could call an oxymoron such as crazy dogmatism, or messy rigidity - their ambition to recompose the left around them, or even to govern one day the country, is likely to come to an end.