Car support or fight against the climate crisis: policies taken between two fires
The automobile tense as much as it fascinates.No wonder it is a sensitive subject in politics.If it is good to spare it despite its polluting character, it leads policies to play balancingists, trapped between environmental imperatives and will not to stigmatize an object that has become, in less than a century, essential to the French.
Embodying freedom and territorial cohesion, the car accumulates utilitarian and symbolic dimensions.Since the post-war period, it has been a mass object registered in the red iron in the country's mental map.Its use favored the multiplication of industrial and commercial areas, rocades, parking lots and roundabouts: France has been redesigned by and for the automobile.
The car also remains one of the French industrial flagships and one of the manufacturing sectors that use the most, even if it is in decline."This makes it a deeply political object," said Chloé Morin, a political scientist associated with the Jean Jaurès Foundation.
For Jérôme Fourquet, Director of the IFOP opinion department and co -author of France before our eyes (threshold, 496 pages, 23 euros), which is interested in the evolution of lifestyles, "today, 85 %Foyers have at least one vehicle, and it is above all an essential good for two thirds of them, which live in particular in peri -urban and rural areas ”.
The “vampirized” household budget
The automobile also weighs very heavy on the wallet of the French.After the revolt of "red caps" in 2013 around the ecotax, the crisis of "yellow vests", at the end of 2018, was triggered in particular in reaction to the increase in fuel prices.
Mandatory in 2011 by Nicolas Sarkozy, the now famous fluorescent yellow equipment is part of a list of new obligations for motorists, which has lengthened since the start of the millennium: increase in the cost of the gray card for vehicles with strong emissions, passage from 90 km/h to 80 km/h on secondary roads, set up of the Crit'Air sticker or hardening of technical control weigh down the budget for motorists.Two-wheelers are no exception, as recalled by recent tensions caused by the transition to paying parking in Paris or even Emmanuel Macron's decline on compulsory technical control.
"What the" yellow vests "have recalled is that without a car, they can do nothing, but its cost vampirizes the budget of households," adds Jérôme Fourquet.An argument supported by Yoann Demoli, sociologist and co -author of an automotive sociology manual (La Découverte, 2019): "The use of the car is geographically and socially laminated.The most dependent are not only those who are far from metropolitan areas, but also the least well -paid."Faced with them," the easier classes stand out from the car ", prolongs the latter.
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