Now that the regional and departmental elections have passed, the campaign for 2022 is starting to punctuate the political agenda. Eric Piolle, candidate for the primary of the Greens for the presidential election, launched his campaign Saturday evening in Pantin in Seine-Saint-Denis, repeatedly inviting his teams to “trust”.
For his first campaign speech in front of more than a hundred activists and supporters, the mayor of Grenoble wanted to be the “heir to the struggles of the past” and the “ally of the feminist and social struggles of today” . He had declared Tuesday his candidacy for the ecologist primary in September.
Heir to “the Paris Commune”
Eric Piolle said he was “certain that we will emerge united from this primary”, because “we have the most coherent vision of society” in relation to other political forces, with for all the environmental candidates “a proximity on the diagnosis and on solutions ”. “We can engage in this primary while being serene”, he declared, surrounded in particular by the former presidential candidate Eva Joly, the MEP David Cormand, the senator Esther Benbassa, and heads of the EELV list. to regional ones in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Fabienne Greber and in Center-Val-de-Loire Charles Fournier.
The mayor of Grenoble said he felt “totally depository of the heritage of previous generations”, referring to “the Paris Commune”, “the Popular Front”, “the scientists of the 70s, 80s and 90s”, but also the “pioneers”. of ecology ”, such as the former 1974 presidential candidate René Dumont, Noël Mamère, Eva Joly, MEP Karima Delli, former minister Cécile Duflot, José Bové. “I feel fully in this history of environmentalists, I am proud of it, and I assume everything”, he insisted.
A minute of silence
“I also take on the role of an ally in today’s struggles,” he added, citing feminist and anti-racist struggles, youth marches for the climate and “social and democratic” struggles, such as that of “yellow vests”. He also invited a minute of silence for “our dead”, “from Vital Michalon (killed in 1977 during an environmental demonstration against the construction of the Creys-Malville plant) to Rémi Fraisse (killed in 2014 by a grenade of a gendarme in Sivens), from Adama Traoré to Sandra ”, last victim of feminicide on Friday.
Eric Piolle will have to face three other candidates for the primary of the Greens: the MEP Yannick Jadot, the former number 2 of the Sandrine Rousseau party, and Jean-Marc Governatori, co-president of the Cap Ecology party.