It’s a new voice that is rebelling against the A69 project, but not sure that it will change the government’s line. Olivier Faure calls on Mediapart on Friday to abandon the Toulouse-Castres motorway project. While the government has said it is determined to see the project through to completion despite opposition from ecologists and scientists, the head of the Socialist Party considers that this project “born at the beginning of the century, before a real awareness ecological, appears today very anachronistic.
“We are in an ecologically contested and questionable project, and socially unjust since it would be the second most expensive highway in France,” he notes, with “a round trip which will cost 17 euros”, for a portion of 53 km. “Socialism has long been confused with productivism. But that was before. Our project today is ecological socialism,” he argues, explaining that “the better life that we demand for all cannot go through the deterioration of living conditions linked to the loss of biodiversity and global warming “.
“Ecological imperative”
“I see nothing that could prevent us from abandoning this project”, which is “moreover unpopular”, he continues, while Carole Delga, in conflict with Olivier Faure since the integration of the PS into the New Ecological Popular Union and social (Nupes) in May 2022, defends this highway.
“It’s always difficult to give up on a project that we carried out against all odds, which cost time, sometimes several decades, of personal investment,” recognizes Olivier Faure. But “we can no longer act as if we were still in the 1980s and if we were thinking only on an economic basis”, supports the First Secretary of the PS, “in favor of all these projects being put through the sieve of the imperative ecological”. Opponents of this section of motorway, which would reduce the Castres-Toulouse journey by around 20 minutes and must be put into service in 2025, have called for a weekend of mobilization on Saturday and Sunday on the route.