The difficulty of mobilising popular support for environmental causes undermines the prospects for political ecology’s success. Simultaneously global and local, the very nature of environmental concerns makes mass mobilisation seemingly impossible.  

It is either pioneering, ultra-aware citizens concerned about climate justice and the state of the planet; or it is local, potentially violent, battles. These struggles can be territorialised to the point of becoming “Zones to Defend”, the protest camps emerging from occupations such as that organised against the Notre- Dame-des-Landes airport in the 2010s. From campaigns against mines, reservoirs and infrastructure projects to direct actions blocking shipments of nuclear waste, this second category has a hard time attracting support from beyond the affected areas.

The fundamental problem is that grassroots environmental movements rarely spread beyond narrow circles. Even when their struggles intersect with questions of public health — the dioxin and “Mad Cow” scandals at the end of the 1990s are prime examples — wider support is by no means guaranteed. Droughts may be affecting more and more people and climate change may now be acknowledged by the majority, but the climate movement remains small.  

Public awareness can, from time to time, lead to electoral gains for Green parties and lasting spells in local or national government. But despite the progress of environmental awareness in Western societies, the mobilisation of a chunk of European youth, repeated scientific warnings, and tangible environmental emergencies, social tensions rarely boil over because of environmental matters.  

True, one can point to the demonstrations against nuclear power stations, from the 1970s to the massive protests that followed the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters. Or the first global Fridays For Future marches led by Greta Thunberg. But environmental movements have throughout their history been rooted in the mobilisation of certain sections of society, not in social struggles and their associated imaginaries.  

Despite the best efforts of Green leaders and intellectuals, the priorities of political ecology fail to line up with social cleavages. Recent social movements demonstrate the divergence between the imaginary of social justice and that of the green political project. In the protests in France against the raising of the retirement age, the language used by unions and opponents of the law has borrowed from the labour movement and its fight for workers’ rights. The environmental necessity of finding a new balance between productive and contemplative life, the need for the proper, material recognition of all forms of paid and unpaid work, and a questioning of the values of our consumerist society has gone unmentioned.  

Worse, it is often out of a rejection of green proposals– seen as illegitimate limits on individual freedom – that powerful social and political movements emerge. In the Netherlands, the BoerBurgerBeweging (Farmer-Citizen Movement) has harnessed the anger of livestock farmers against the government’s plans for a drastic reduction in nitrogen emissions by 2030. Across Europe, radical right-wing parties are attempting to build working-class support by capitalising on opposition to low-emission zones in cities, forthcoming bans on petrol and diesel cars, and the nudging of consumer behaviours. 

The gilets jaunes as environmental activists?

Despite appearances, one of the biggest social movements seen in recent European history has deeply ecological roots. Sparked by the lowering of the speed limit on many main roads, followed by an increase in fuel duty, France’s Gilets jaunes movement kept the country on a knife edge for 18 months with its nationwide weekly protests. Only brought to a halt by the Covid-19 lockdowns, this movement encapsulated the contradictions of the car-based society. It was rural and suburban people – geographically, culturally, and economically distant from urban centres of power – who bore the brunt of the fuel price hike. For them, the price of a full tank of petrol was equivalent to that of bread for the revolutionaries of the Ancien Régime.

The Gilets jaunes movement was a revolt against the “social ideology of the motorcar”.

In autumn 2018, a petition against fuel price rises garnered over a million signatures. Businesswoman Priscillia Ludosky’s initiative was just one of many spontaneous protests against the government’s decision to raise fuel taxes to finance the energy transition. But it was the one that most clearly and directly highlighted the dead end of our car-centric way of life – and questioned the untenable duplicity of an environmental policy based exclusively on the contributions of the poorest.  

The Gilets jaunes movement was a revolt against the “social ideology of the motorcar”, a familiar phrase coined by philosopher André Gorz in 1973. It highlighted the price paid for the freedom that the car brings: the end of local amenities and the erosion of community, declining local services, and anonymous strips of supermarkets and entertainment megaplexes: “a society of roundabouts”. “The Gilets jaunes were the first to expose the undeniable links between social and environmental inequalities,” observes former leader of the French Greens David Cormand in his 2022 book Ce que nous sommes. Analyses of the reasons for the protestors’ anger unanimously emphasised the sense of downward mobility and precarity felt by the lower-middle and working classes, the decline of social connection, and the widespread loss of confidence in institutions, elites, and “the system”.  

For the Gilets jaunes were also an uprising against a faceless and dehumanising system. The symbolic democracy of these improvised gatherings at roundabouts was not lost on honest observers of the movement. By reappropriating these ugly, concrete places of transit, the Gilets jaunes were recreating communal spaces. They fitted them out with gazebos, tents, artworks, and makeshift shelters, turning them into public places for direct democracy, meetings, debates, camaraderie and even, according to some reports, love.

The subaltern could not speak

Those who took the movement seriously understood that the discontent and alienation caused by the reign of individualism was not just felt by the affluent and the urban middle class. A backlash against anonymity and polarisation, loneliness, and isolation, the movement revealed a thirst for community and togetherness and the desire to share common cause and culture – but outside of a system on its last legs. It recreated symbolic connection.  

All that was needed was a film by a great chronicler of working-class struggle and social decay like Ken Loach to produce a French Raining Stones, thus allowing entry into the middle-class cultural canon. This absence became a key impediment for this spontaneous, informal, and inexperienced movement.  

Torn between the need for spokespeople and a refusal to be trapped in a game of political demands and figureheads, the Gilets jaunes were unable to overcome the contradictions of their movement for direct democracy. Harassed by a toxic media that insisted they participate in a system designed by and for political and cultural elites, they lacked real “interpreters” as defined by anthropologist and activist David Graeber. Political parties sympathetic to working-class concerns, both on the far right and far left of the political spectrum, tried their best. But their media gaffes, ideological wavering, and distance from a France they no longer live in confirmed the Gilets jaunes’ belief that all they could expect from political parties was co-optation.  

The Gilets jaunes was one manifestation of the “political multitudes of anti-politics”, another step on the long march by those on the margins of the system to hold the self-proclaimed democrats in power to account. Without interpreters, credentialled intellectuals, or leaders, they found themselves at the mercy of those from their ranks keen to get their 15 minutes of fame, or simply likened to media stereotypes of mob violence – a new, updated version of the “dangerous classes”.  

Amidst this mutual incomprehension, the accusation of “populism” took root. Populism is born when subalterns are forbidden or disqualified from speaking, explain philosopher Étienne Balibar and feminist critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. It is in this sense that the Gilets jaunes movement was “populist”; as the expression of subalterns marginalised by a dominant culture that sneered at their appearance, tastes, and attitudes – or worse, pretended to like them from afar and reframed them as part of a rigged “great debate”.

There can be no political outlet for a social movement without the work of intellectuals.

The symptom of a deep “democratic breakdown”, what the Gilets jaunes sorely needed to become a genuine political movement – a green social movement – were intermediaries. Spokespeople who could avoid the traps of the institutional and media system. Interpreters of anger and revolt who could translate the reality of some into the language of all. The violence that characterised some of the movement’s excesses was in part down to a hearing failure by those who should have been listening. 

Every revolution needs a poet

If France’s umpteenth peasant revolt turned into the political upheavals that gave us the French Revolution, it is precisely because the Third Estate also included an intermediary class of bourgeois heralds. Lawyers, tradesmen, country priests, and journalists were the ones who mediated and voiced grievances.

In August 1980, Catholic journalist [and future Polish prime minister] Tadeusz Mazowiecki and Jewish historian and former communist Bronisław Geremek arrived in Gdańsk with a message of support from 64 Polish intellectuals for the striking workers at the Lenin Shipyard. Together with leader of the union movement Lech Wałęsa, their delegation stood for the unity of the intelligentsia and the working class. Geremek later recounted that, as he and Mazowiecki were about drive off, Wałęsa stopped them and demanded that they speak on behalf of the workers in concrete terms. The intellectuals were often former Communist Party members and could speak the language of their adversaries; they knew the rules, the tricks, and the traps. Culminating in the Round Table Agreement of 1989, Solidarność’s struggle against the communist system would never have succeeded without this alliance between intellectuals and the social movement.

There can be no political outlet for a social movement without the work of intellectuals. It is not enough for the leadership to channel the anger and hopes of its followers; the members themselves must be able to negotiate and reach an agreement with the adversary. It is the Byrons, Goethes, Lamartines, Petöfis, Hugos, Bölls, and Sartres of this world who help give those on the barricades a voice in the corridors of power, carrying it from grassroots meetings to middle-class dinner parties, translating it from the language of the street to the idiom of polite society.  

They are the messengers, the interpreters. The people who carry the voices of the subalterns and help them to be heard. For it is from mutual miscommunication that mistrust and violence are born.

The only political family with a lens that could have understood the democratic, environmental and social issues at the heart of this profound popular revolt – the French Greens – failed to be its champions.

Europe’s populist moment is not over. If Greens – all over Europe – are to seize this opportunity without it corrupting them, they must acknowledge what is required: to interpret popular aspirations and offer them a political outlet. This effort will require that they venture beyond urban centres and grow new roots in society. And above all to learn to speak the languages of classes other than their own.