Greener than the Greens? An analysis of La France insoumise’s ‘popular environmentalist’ discourse

While recent research has analysed the emergence of environmental populism in different contexts (Bosworth 2020 ; Koutnik 2020) or examined the greening of European radical left parties (Wang & Keith 2020), little work has empirically analysed the place of environmentalism and climate issues in the narratives and agendas of left-wing populist parties. We propose to follow this avenue through a case study of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s movement, La France Insoumise (LFI, Unbowed France), a left-wing populist movement that has embraced climate challenges. We are especially interested in the relationship between populism and environmentalism in LFI’s discourse to understand to what extent it can be considered as a ‘green populism’. We rely on different sources of data (leaders’ writings, party manifestos, semi- structured interviews with activists) and perform qualitative and quantitative text analyses of leaders and activists’ discourses (NVivo and Iramuteq). We first show that environmentalism is an inseparable element of LFI’s genesis: the early greening of the leaders’ narrative is in line with a process of dissociation from the Socialist Party and emancipation from the French Communist Party’s productivist matrix. We then analyse the climate agenda of LFI and find that the party has set the ‘ecological bifurcation’ as one of its priorities in the 2017 and 2022 presidential elections with the aim of dissociating itself from the Green Party (Europe Ecologie - Les Verts) by advocating a ‘popular ecology’. We show that environmentalism thus participates in the construction of the ‘people’ mobilised by LFI through its association with popular sovereignty, its anti-oligarchic framing and a theorisation of the 'human people’. Finally, we show that LFI’s activists, some of whom are fully involved in environmental mobilisations, mostly share the party's climate agenda, although some of them draw an opposition between the ‘ecological question’ and the ‘popular question’ symbolised, for instance, by the surge of the Yellow Vests.