King Charles III pleaded Thursday for a new “Agreement” with Paris on the climate during a speech receiving a standing ovation in front of French parliamentarians in the Senate, before going to the Notre-Dame construction site. Alternating speaking in French and English, King Charles III, with strong environmental convictions, proposed before the Senate that France and the United Kingdom commit to an “Agreement for Sustainability” in order to respond “more effectively » to “the global climate and biodiversity emergency”.
Inspired by the Entente Cordiale, a text signed in 1904 by the two countries to iron out their very strong differences at the time, the monarch, with a pink flower in his buttonhole, called for “meeting the immense challenges of the world which confront us surrounds”, on the 2nd day of his first state visit to France.
British Prime Minister puts brakes on ecological ambitions
These comments come the day after British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s decision to postpone several key measures of the United Kingdom’s climate policy. “I am confident that we can take a more pragmatic, proportionate and realistic approach to achieving carbon neutrality, which lessens the burden on workers,” Rishi Sunak said on Wednesday at a hastily organized press conference after that his intentions were leaked to the media.
This speech by King Charles III from the podium of the French Senate, greeted by a “standing ovation”, was a first for a British sovereign. In 2004, his mother Elizabeth II gave a speech in the Senate Conference Room, in front of assembled deputies and senators, but not in the hemicycle.