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Macron urges fresh push to fight climate change and poverty

French President Emmanuel Macron said on Friday that the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East should not distract the world from tackling climate change and poverty.

Published: 29 December 2023 12:30 CET

Macron urges fresh push to fight climate change and poverty

French President Emmanuel Macron writes that fighting poverty and climate change must be the global priorities. Photo by Ludovic MARIN / AFP

In an op-ed published in the newspaper Le Monde, Macron proposed a new global climate pact and reiterated his calls to reform global financial governance to better involve emerging countries.

The French president is keen to move on with his reform agenda after months of wrangling over controversial immigration legislation, whose passage in parliament sparked a political crisis this month.

He said Russia’s war in Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas conflict “must not make us deviate from our priorities”.

“We must accelerate the ecological transition and the fight against poverty at the same time,” Macron said.

“No country will agree to lead its population into a social and economic dead end to protect the planet.”

Macron has made tackling climate change a key plank of his policies.

Nearly 200 nations meeting at the UN’s COP28 climate summit in Dubai agreed earlier this month to a first-ever call for the world to transition away from fossil fuels.

Macron said it was up to developed G7 countries as well as China to lead the way to help wean the world off fossil fuels.

“We must exit coal in 2030, exit oil in 2045 and exit gas in 2050,” he wrote.

He said the financing of renewable energies but also of nuclear energy in emerging countries should be accelerated.

Macron also called for reform of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

“Eighty years after its creation, this financial architecture is undersized compared to the size of the world economy and population,” he said.

“It is also largely fragmented, because we have not opened the door to emerging and developing countries in the governance of these institutions.”

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Azerbaijan vehemently rejects the accusation it bears responsibility for the riots that have led to the deaths of five people and rattled the Paris government.

But it is just the latest in a litany of tensions between Paris and Baku and not the first time France has accused Azerbaijan of being behind an alleged disinformation campaign.

The riots in New Caledonia, a French territory lying between Australia and Fiji, were sparked by moves to agree a new voting law that supporters of independence from France say discriminates against the indigenous Kanak population.

Paris points to the sudden emergence of Azerbaijani flags alongside Kanak symbols in the protests, while a group linked to the Baku authorities is openly backing separatists while condemning Paris.

“This isn’t a fantasy. It’s a reality,” interior minister Gérald Darmanin told television channel France 2 when asked if Azerbaijan, China and Russia were interfering in New Caledonia.

“I regret that some of the Caledonian pro-independence leaders have made a deal with Azerbaijan. It’s indisputable,” he alleged.

But he added: “Even if there are attempts at interference… France is sovereign on its own territory, and so much the better”.

“We completely reject the baseless accusations,” Azerbaijan’s foreign ministry spokesman Ayhan Hajizadeh said.

“We refute any connection between the leaders of the struggle for freedom in Caledonia and Azerbaijan.”

In images widely shared on social media, a reportage broadcast Wednesday on the French channel TF1 showed some pro-independence supporters wearing T-shirts adorned with the Azerbaijani flag.

Tensions between Paris and Baku have grown in the wake of the 2020 war and 2023 lightning offensive that Azerbaijan waged to regain control of its breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region from ethnic Armenian separatists.

France is a traditional ally of Christian Armenia, Azerbaijan’s neighbour and historic rival, and is also home to a large Armenian diaspora.

Darmanin said Azerbaijan – led since 2003 by President Ilham Aliyev, who succeeded his father Heydar – was a “dictatorship”.

On Wednesday, the Paris government also banned social network TikTok from operating in New Caledonia.

Tiktok, whose parent company is Chinese, has been widely used by protesters. Critics fear it is being employed to spread disinformation coming from foreign countries.

Azerbaijan invited separatists from the French territories of Martinique, French Guiana, New Caledonia and French Polynesia to Baku for a conference in July 2023.

The meeting saw the creation of the “Baku Initiative Group”, whose stated aim is to support “French liberation and anti-colonialist movements”.

The group published a statement this week condemning the French parliament’s proposed change to New Caledonia’s constitution, which would allow outsiders who moved to the territory at least 10 years ago the right to vote in its elections.

Pro-independence forces say that would dilute the vote of Kanaks, who make up about 40 percent of the population.

“We stand in solidarity with our Kanak friends and support their fair struggle,” the Baku Initiative Group said.

Raphael Glucksmann, the lawmaker heading the list for the French Socialists in June’s European Parliament elections, told Public Senat television that Azerbaijan had made “attempts to interfere… for months”.

He said the underlying problem behind the unrest was a domestic dispute over election reform, not agitation fomented by “foreign actors”.

But he accused Azerbaijan of “seizing on internal problems.”

A French government source, who asked not to be named, said pro-Azerbaijani social media accounts had on Wednesday posted an edited montage purporting to show two white police officers with rifles aimed at dead Kanaks.

“It’s a pretty massive campaign, with around 4,000 posts generated by (these) accounts,” the source told AFP.

“They are reusing techniques already used during a previous smear campaign called Olympia.”

In November, France had already accused actors linked to Azerbaijan of carrying out a disinformation campaign aimed at damaging its reputation over its ability to host the Olympic Games in Paris. Baku also rejected these accusations.