Emmanuel Macron challenged the Spanish president, Pedro Sánchez, on Monday to convince him that Europe needs to build the MidCat gas pipeline between Spain and France, which the French president considers useless to face the current crisis and harmful to the environment. Macron said that it is “false, factually false” that the MidCat resolves gas shortages and, paraphrasing General De Gaulle, declared that he did not understand why one should get agitated and “jump like Pyrenean kids” over this matter. “I speak of facts, I don’t do politics,” Macron said to justify his opposition to MidCat, in one at a press conference in Paris, after meeting by videoconference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. “Chancellor Scholz”, he added, “he has not given me different facts that have convinced me of the need for a gas interconnection. If President Sánchez tells me tomorrow: ‘here are the facts’, I am willing to review my position.” In response to a question from the press, Macron confirmed the French position against the new gas pipeline. But he developed it like no one else in the French government and the Elysée had done it in public to date. “We need more electrical interconnections,” he said. “I am not convinced that we need more gas interconnections whose consequences for the environment and ecosystems are more important.” Sánchez and Scholz have joined in defending this project between the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of Europe, which began to build in the past decade and was interrupted in 2019 after the opinion against the Spanish and French regulators due to the high costs. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the search for alternative suppliers to Russia have revived the project. But from the beginning the idea has met with an outright rejection in France. In an interview with the newspaper Le Monde published on Monday, the Spanish Minister for the Ecological Transition, Teresa Ribera, responded to a question about the French non-MidCat: “This is not a bilateral issue between a country and its neighbor. It is about building the Europe of energy. Right now we have to reflect on how to be sure that Europe will be able to survive the 2023-2024 winter without Russian gas, because the return to normality will take more than a few months”. Exports to Spain Macron’s argument is twofold. First, he believes that the Midcat is useless in responding to the current crisis stemming from the threat of Russian supply shutdown. He explained that “the reality is that there are already two gas pipelines between Spain and France” and that these, since the beginning or current period of tension in February, have been used at 55% of their capacity. What’s more, he affirmed: France was exporting gas to Spain in August.”I say this very naively: I don’t understand the short-term problem that we are trying to solve, I don’t understand it,” he declared. “And to plagiarize one of my predecessors: I don’t understand why we would jump like Pyrenean kids on this issue to explain that it would solve the gas problem. It is false, factually false. If today we were at 100% utilization of our gas pipelines and today there was a need to export gas to France, Germany and elsewhere, I would say yes, but it is not like that.” The image of the “goat” has a designation of origin . It was pronounced by General De Gaulle, then President of the Republic, in December 1965, during the so-called empty chair crisis, when France blocked decisions in the European Economic Community for months. Accused of what today would be called eurosceptic, De Gaulle defended himself: “You can only do politics based on realities. Sure, we can jump on the chair like a kid saying: ‘Europe, Europe, Europe!’ But it doesn’t lead to anything and it doesn’t mean anything” The current French president, continuing with the reasoning, said that he does not believe that the MidCat will respond to a greater gas flow through Spain in the future. “It would mean that Spain would double or triple gas imports from the south,” he said. “Honestly, I don’t think so.” Macron’s second argument is that if MidCat were built, it would run into strong environmental opposition. “That is not without foundation,” he added. In his opinion, the gas pipeline does not respond to the objectives of combating climate change, nor to the future forecasts of gas imports from Spain. He also claimed that using the MidCat to transport hydrogen would require expensive tube work. And that, according to the experts he has consulted, it would be “abhorrent” to transport hydrogen from Spain to France or Germany, since “what needs to be transported is low-carbon electricity from Spain to carry out electrolysis in the production sites that need hydrogen.” Macron concluded: “France is a cooperative European country, which believes in European solidarity, and I will do everything necessary to improve European energy solidarity. If there are facts that amend what I have just said, I will take them into account and I will come before you to tell you: ‘Here is what Spain, Germany and another country has told me and explained, and that is why I defend MidCat’. But today I give the facts.”