HEADLINES FROM 2018: The age of glorifying Greta Thunberg is over.

Greta Thunberg spent her weekend in France supporting two environmental campaigns. On Sunday she appeared at a rally in Bordeaux against an oil drilling project; twenty-four hours earlier the twenty-one-year-old Swede was further east, adding her voice to those activists opposed to the construction of a new stretch of motorway between Toulouse and Castres. “We are here in solidarity with those who are resisting this project and this madness,” said Thunberg in English, her now familiar keffiyeh around her neck.

Some French media described Thunberg as an “anti-global warming icon” and the “figurehead in the fight to protect the planet.” She might have been once.

Now, however, in her ubiquitous keffiyeh, appearing to chant “Crush Zionism” or endorsing slogans such as “Palestine will be free” she has become — perhaps unwittingly — the figurehead for what conservative commentators in France call “the green alliance.”

Three years ago Jean Messiha, the spokesman for Éric Zemmour during his 2022 presidential campaign, wrote of this strange coalition between Islamists and ecologists: “They share one color: green. But not only that. They also share a totalitarian approach to society.”

Plus ça change: the original European environmentalists who had a strange coalition with Islamists were awfully totalitarian as well.