“Politically, everything pushes me to go back”, but “personally, the decision is more complex”. This is how Matthieu Orphelin, ecologist deputy from Maine-et-Loire and former spokesperson for Yannick Jadot, weighed his candidacy for the June legislative elections. He finally gave up, he announced on Friday, highlighting his desire to “carry out his fights differently”. The 49-year-old elected official evokes, on Twitter, a “burn-out at the end of 2019” and the resolution “not to become a professional politician”.
Matthieu Orphelin lists the “battles won and lost” in five years: end of hydrocarbon production voted in 2017, even insufficient climate law, extension of the energy check, bicycle plan… but no climate ISF, eco-conditionality aid to companies or recognition of the blank vote.
He is desperate to see “ecologists and left-wing parties embark on fratricidal wars in 2022 and prefer to lose alone than to win together”. And judges that it is necessary “to refound the place of ecology in politics”. But he feels the need and “the desire to (re) recharge his batteries, to (regenerate) himself, to carry out (his) battles differently”.
Withdrawn from the campaign
At the end of November, Matthieu Orphelin had been “removed from his responsibilities” as spokesperson in the presidential campaign of environmentalists, against a background in particular of strategic disagreements.
Elected for the first time as a deputy in June 2017 under the LREM label, this former close friend of Nicolas Hulot had left the majority group in February 2019, citing in particular insufficient progress on “climate, ecological and social issues”. He had often expressed a dissonant voice, refusing to be the “green surety” of the majority.
The deputy then founded and co-directed in 2020 the Ecology Democracy Solidarity group in the Assembly. Last year for the regional elections, Matthieu Orphelin led an EELV-PS list in Pays de la Loire, which came second (34.9% of the vote) behind the outgoing president of the region, Christelle Morançais (LR). This engineer by training, who made a career at the Environment and Energy Management Agency (Ademe), remains a regional opposition adviser.