PARIS — President Emmanuel Macron avoided a messy divorce this week when he convinced Monique Barbut, his restive minister for ecological transition, not to follow through on her public declaration to resign over the passage of a controversial farming bill.
But the episode highlighted deepening fractures inside his already embattled centrist coalition — which, if divided, risks being wiped out in next year’s presidential election.
The crisis spans both policy and politics. Macron’s centrists, like many across Europe, are struggling to balance environmental protections and the fight against climate change on the one hand, and assisting a farming industry facing tightening margins as well as increasingly difficult production conditions on the other.
Roughly one-third of lawmakers from the president’s own party on Monday either voted against or abstained from voting on the law, after amendments were added at the last minute allowing France’s food and drug safety watchdog to approve the use of a controversial pesticide, acetamiprid, for nut producers and doubling the amount of water farmers can store over the next decade despite the threat of more climate change-induced droughts.
“Politically, we’ve managed to turn a law with more than 70 articles into a fruitless, dogmatic debate,” said Jérémy Decerle, a member of the European Parliament representing Macron’s Renaissance party, and the former head of the Young Farmers union.
But the drama within parliament also showed just how nasty the infighting has gotten in the overcrowded field of presidential candidates. Two of Macron’s former prime ministers, Edouard Philippe and Gabriel Attal, are running for the presidency and threaten to split the centrist vote, thereby costing their camp a place in the runoff of the two-round race.
During parliamentary debate on the bill, Attal, who fell out with Macron after the ill-fated decision to call a snap election in 2024, asked why it was used to hastily reopen the explosive debate over pesticides.
After Agriculture Minister Annie Genevard declined to answer publicly, Attal texted her to complain, according to someone who saw the message and was granted anonymity to share sensitive private correspondence without fear of reprisal. Genevard appeared to mistake Attal for current Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu, a nominal political ally of the duo.
Genevard replied: “But Sébastien, you’re the one who told me not to answer him,” before quickly deleting the message and sending a corrected response, said the individual who saw the texts.
The Agriculture Ministry declined to comment on the incident, but the purported exchange has reinforced suspicions among Attal’s allies that Lecornu — one of Macron’s most loyal lieutenants — has been quietly trying to undermine his own party’s candidate.
“The prime minister opposed having a real debate. Genevard’s text message suggests there was a clear desire on his part to prevent that debate from happening,” said Corinne Lepage, a former French environment minister during Jacques Chirac’s presidency.
“The 2027 election is still likely to be shaped by the current backlash against environmental policies,” said Lepage, who recently authored a book on the green backlash. “But given what France is already experiencing — heatwaves, rising mortality — climate and adaptation will inevitably become central campaign issues. We can no longer pretend they’re secondary,” she added.
One setback too many
Since Macron lost his parliamentary majority in 2022, successive governments have relaxed or slowed down the rollout of green policies under pressure from farmers, conservatives and local officials, weakening low-emission zones for polluting vehicles, relaxing urban development rules and trimming parts of the environmental budget.
For Barbut, a former climate diplomat and head of WWF France with limited experience in front-line politics, approving the use of acetamiprid in exceptional circumstances was a final straw.
Following an emotional, teary-eyed speech to her staff laying out her grievances against the government, Barbut took to LinkedIn to publicly announce her resignation. She called the legislation “one environmental setback too many,” saying that “forces opposing” her green transition agenda had become “too powerful” for her to carry out her job.
Had Barbut ended up stepping down, Macron would have been on the hunt for his ninth environment minister in as many years — a potentially embarrassing level of turnover for a leader who entered office in 2017 styling himself as a climate champion vowing to “make our planet great again.” Macron’s first environment minister, Nicolas Hulot — a former TV host and one of the most famous environmental campaigners in France — resigned for similar reasons, but live on public radio without having warned anyone ahead of time. Hulot also complained about France’s influential farmers’ unions and that in cases where he had been pitted against the agriculture ministry, he always lost.
The debate over acetamiprid is particularly heated, given it is authorized for use in the European Union but banned in France — which farmers’ unions say creates unfair market conditions.
France’s National Order of Physicians has opposed any form of reauthorization of acetamiprid, previously arguing that “doubt is not reasonable when it comes to substances that may expose the population to major risks: neurodevelopmental disorders, pediatric cancers, chronic diseases.”
Some lab and animal studies suggest acetamiprid may cause DNA damage or act as a hormone disruptor — both potential cancer pathways — although the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has concluded it’s “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans.”
“If France is the only country in Europe raising so many questions about this product, we need to take a hard look at ourselves. The other 26 European countries aren’t looking to poison their populations,” said Decerle, the MEP from Renaissance.
Sarah Paillou contributed to this report.
Environment ministry chaos tears France’s centrists apart
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