France’s Green party urge no confidence vote over heatwave response

PARIS - France’s Green party said on June 30 it planned to bring a vote of no confidence against the government over its response to deadly heatwaves that have claimed at least 1,000 lives.

France experienced five days of unseasonably high temperatures in May, followed by a record-breaking 11-day heatwave in June.

The country on June 24 faced its hottest day since measurements began in 1947, with a national average temperature of 30 deg C.

While the motion of no confidence is not expected to pass, it reflects the anger of some French politicians over what they describe as inadequate measures to help people face heat of above 40 deg C in many parts of the country in June.

Green parliamentary leader Cyrielle Chatelain said her party planned to submit a motion of no confidence against Sebastien Lecornu’s government on June 30.

“The government’s lack of adaptation kills, just as much as the heat does,” Chatelain told reporters.

The situation “in our schools and in our hospitals shows that we have a government that is incapable of managing.”

The latest episode of extreme temperatures disrupted life in France, where few homes are equipped with air-conditioning units and most schools are not designed to cope with extreme heat.

Lecornu said on June 29 that more people had died in their homes during the latest heatwave than in previous episodes.

Jean-Francois Benoist, the manager of several funeral homes in the Fontainebleau area south-east of Paris, said more people were dying at home.

“We’re under severe strain,” he told AFP.

“Since the end of last week, there have been constant requests for people to be able to come to a funeral home, and unfortunately all the spaces are taken.”

Heatwaves typically cause between 1,000 and 7,000 deaths per year in France, and “this summer we may be closer to 7,000 than to 1,000“, epidemiologist Basile Chaix of French research institute INSERM told AFP.

Nicolas Revel, director-general of the Paris public hospital system, has said he expected the death toll from the June heatwave to be lower than that of 2003, when 15,000 people died, but “probably” higher than an episode in 2025 that claimed 5,700 lives.

Several Green lawmakers and senators have said the record June heatwave might have claimed about 10,000 lives.

Lecornu in Parliament on June 30 accused the Greens of spreading “false” information, calling it “scandalous”.

Citing preliminary figures, health officials on June 28 said they registered around 1,000 more deaths than during the same period in previous months since June 24.

Health Minister Stephanie Rist’s office said those figures were expected to rise as they were based on electronic death certificates, which “cover only about 60 per cent of deaths on average”.

But the death toll should remain below that of 2003, Rist’s office added.

A toddler in the city of Marseille, a three-year-old in a Paris suburb, as well as a two-year-old and a four-year-old in the southern town of Carpentras died last week in parked cars that had overheated.

Caroline Semaille, director general of Public Health France, said that there were at least 300 more deaths than expected during the unusually early May heatwave, though they were due to all causes combined and were not necessarily linked to elevated temperatures. AFP