ABSTRACT

On 26 January 2017 Marine Le Pen, the president of the National Front (Front National) announced the party’s environmental agenda during a first of a series of so called presidential conferences accomplished in parallel with National Front’s campaign for the presidential race. By emphasising environmental threats against the French nation, such as climate change, pollution, energy policies and resource depletion, Marine Le Pen illustrated her vision for a ‘patriotic ecology’ that would be based on the protection of public health and security as well as French territory, heritage and national identity. This chapter examines how the National Front adopted green politics; while at the same time was linked to populist and nationalist values through a systematic analysis of the party’s environmental discourses. By summarising the Discourse Historical Approach (DHA) to Critical Discourse Studies and drawing upon its argumentation strategies, this chapter intends to illustrate the discursive resurgence of the French nation and nation-state imaginaries through an analysis of the anti-Europeanisation and populist anti-elitism that dominate the French presidential candidate’s rhetoric and is linked to the far right green tradition by analysing Marine Le Pen’s s speech on ‘France durable’ and focusing on the party’s ‘new ecology movement’ website.