Ségolène Royal – who hopes to become France’s first female president – is currently in a delicate position.
After being outed for her numerous absences at the Arctic Council meetings, Emmanuel Macron’s ambassador of the Poles, was once again embarrassed in front of the microphone of the programme Quotidien, which aired on Friday, September 20.
The former presidential candidate of 2007, who wants to try her luck again in 2022, was keen to deny the “false claims” that she did not attend any of the Council’s meetings. “I am in all meetings, France is a full member,” she argued, without really indicating whether she had personally attended these meetings.
And to justify herself she added: “I do not stroll around for pleasure, as others perhaps do. I pay attention to the movements, those that are really useful. And I pay attention to the carbon footprint.”
Previously, her staff had tried to provide a justification for these absences at Arctic meetings by saying: “Ségolène Royal decides to travel according to her commitments and her carbon footprint.”
This time, the journalist Valentine Oberti was not so easily convinced however. The latter then reminded the former Minister of the Environment – a typical champagne Socialist – of her presence, in July 2018, on a luxurious cruise ship in Iceland, with the inauguration of the Lapérouse.
Ségolène Royal had made a round trip in a specially chartered plane for the occasion, leaving and returning on the same day. Initially Royal denied this information categorically, but then she suddenly remembered this particular trip when her interlocutor presented her with the evidence of her ecological wastefulness: a photo of the ceremony in which Royal appears as a guest.
“Yes? So what? It was not at the expense of the state, contrary to what you are insinuating,” she responded, obviously annoyed at Oberti. While stupidly insisting that such flights by plane are ecological and do not contribute to pollution, the ambassador of the Poles also tried to cling to French nationalist, blue, white and red sympathies by emphasizing that the shipping company which chartered the plane, Ponant, is French.
“Ponant’s cruise liners pay close attention to their carbon footprint and offset their carbon footprint, which is not the case for all companies,” she fumed.
But even if her plane tickets were not at the expense of the state, they were definitely not devoid of a carbon footprint. But the presidential hopeful does not seem to know this or care much.