“I no longer intend for my candidacy to be used against France Insoumise and the New Popular Front to harm them at a time when all energy must be mobilized to beat the extreme right. » With emotion but also firmness in his voice, Adrien Quatennens declared to the press that he was refusing to run in the legislative elections in Lille.
“I know that this decision will disappoint a lot of people, but it seems to me that it will bring relief to even more people,” he added. “I have the deep conviction that my situation is only a pretext used to play politics. I have the right to think so. And at this moment, I feel that I have the right to say it,” he also declared. Elected since 2017 in the first constituency of the North, Adrien Quatennens was re-elected by LFI despite his four-month suspended prison sentence for domestic violence.
The “pain” of Jean-Luc Mélenchon
This decision had caused indignation among the parties making up the New Popular Front with LFI, particularly among the socialists and ecologists, his case having already been debated for several days. Amy Bah, from the feminist collective Noustoutes, announced her candidacy in the constituency on Saturday, in the name of the “values” of the New Popular Front, but without an official nomination. LFI finally invested in Aurélien Le Coq, national co-host of Jeunes insoumis. And asked, a priori in vain, for the “withdrawal of any dissident candidacy”.
On France3, Jean-Luc Mélenchon confided his “pain” at seeing his protégé give up, criticizing “a sentence of ineligibility so we don’t know when it will end” and citing a “right to rehabilitation”. “It’s extraordinary to see a man capable, when he goes to an election where he has the greatest chance of being elected, to say ‘I don’t want to be a problem for my cause’”, also remembered the leader of rebellious France.
The withdrawal of Adrien Quatennens perhaps sounds the death knell, at the age of 34, of the political career of the man who was once considered the heir of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the man who “taught him everything” and ‘supported until the end.
EELV MP Sandrine Rousseau was the first to have made the Quatennens case a condition for the unity of the left, upon the announcement on June 9 of the dissolution of the National Assembly by Emmanuel Macron. From Clémentine Autain to François Ruffin, criticism continued to come after his inauguration on Friday. Several members of the New Popular Front welcomed the withdrawal of Adrien Quatennens this Sunday.