France: chilling out gets political in class war over air con

Marine Le Pen’s call for an urgent plan to cool down France has been met with outrage from the left and Greens.

Populist champion and presidential favourite Marine Le Pen in Paris. Picture: AFP

The summer heat has opened a new front in France’s 236-year-old war between the left and right: the morality of air conditioning.

Marine Le Pen, the populist champion and presidential favourite, responded to this month’s 40C temperatures with a call for an urgent “national air-conditioning plan” to help the sweltering lower classes. Schools, which saw 2000 heat-forced closures last week, and aged-care homes were especially hit, she said.

“They suffocate in buildings without air conditioning because leaders have decided that the French people should suffer ... while they obviously enjoy air-conditioned vehicles and offices,” the leader of the hard-right National Rally told parliament.

Ms Le Pen was tweaking the ingrained view among France’s superior classes that there is something sinful about climate control. Even before the fear of greenhouse gases emerged in the 1970s, air conditioning was seen as an unnatural, noisy, costly and unhealthy indulgence suitable for soft Americans, not for the steely French.

But the outlook has shifted, with wider adoption of “la clim” in homes, mainly in the sunny south. Some 25 per cent of French homes now have air conditioning, well below the level of equipped homes in Italy and Spain, which is 40 per cent. In Britain it is 5 per cent and Germany 3 per cent. Sixty per cent of all new cars in France have climate control.

The old outlook endures, however, as witnessed by the refusal by the 2024 Paris Olympics organisers to cool the athletes’ village.

A thicket of regulations govern installations, with permission needed from the town mayor for houses and a vote from co-owners in apartment buildings. A 2021 survey found that 48 per cent of French people believed air conditioners should be outlawed because of environmental damage.

People scramble for water as temperatures top 40C in Paris. Picture: Getty Images.

Ms Le Pen’s attack on the country’s leaders as hypocritical was aimed at her core audience, who are seen by the thinking classes as diesel-driving cigarette smokers. “For the so-called French elite, austerity is always reserved for the lower-middle and working classes,” she said.

Right-wing commentators railed at the lectures on climate virtue from the “nanny state”. Often mentioned is the renaming of the weather forecast on France 2 television, equivalent to the ABC in Australia. It is now Meteo Climat, instead of just La Meteo. In another example, a caller to a government hotline for coping with heat was told to avoid even using a basic electric fan.

On the other side of the political divide, the left and Greens voiced outrage at the call from a party leader who plays down climate change and opposes wind turbines. Agnes Pannier-Runacher, the Environment Minister, called Ms Le Pen incompetent and ignorant because aged-care homes were already required by law to provide an air-conditioned room for fragile residents.

“We need to provide air conditioning for vulnerable people and give them some respite,” Ms Pannier- Runacher, a career Treasury official and graduate of elite universities, said. “However, we mustn’t do it everywhere, otherwise we risk warming the planet, which is a bad solution.”

Gabriel Attal, who leads President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Renaissance party, said the focus must be placed on insulation and buildings designed like traditional southern structures to cope with outdoor heat. Along similar lines, Sandrine Rousseau, a radical Green MP, urged France to revert to shutters and fans.

THE TIMES