He believes that we “lose time pretending”. Gold, Aurelien Pradie is more accustomed to cutting corners. At 22, he was elected, against all odds and against his former teacher, general councilor of Lot after a moped campaign that has gone down in history. At 24, he took the mayor’s sash in his small town of Labastide Murat. At 31, he became a deputy for Lot, after having crisscrossed the Causses anchored to the left, in green Méhari this time. At 36, he is launched to conquer his party. Too stressed ? Some at LR are not far from thinking it about this slender challenger who “tends to consider as old all people who are over 40 years old”. The most dubious or wicked confine him to this youthism by nicknaming him “the surfing teacher”, alluding to his escapades, as often as possible, on the Atlantic Coast. “I am not enarque, then the enarques make fun, notes the person concerned. But the justice of the peace is the elections. I was re-elected MP last year with 65% of the vote when many of them were returning home”.
In the absence of ENA, Aurélien Pradié chose to do law in Toulouse. Jean-Luc Moudenc (ex-LR), the mayor of the Pink City, remembers “this activist, a very nice boy, and not very, very motivated by his studies”. He didn’t finish them either. The city councilor, on the other hand, remembers with what “passion” and what pride, the very young mayor invited him to the Lot a few years later to show him a multidisciplinary health center. “He has always had this attraction for everything social, this attention for the most modest”, underlines the Toulousain.
Notable events
Because this son of small walnut traders does not deny either his origins or his scars. Surfing is also a way for him to return to family vacations and “the years of happy childhood”. They stopped dead when he was 16, the day his father suffered a stroke. This is because he spent more than “half of [sa vie] with a mute father”, nailed to an armchair, that Aurélien Pradié has always carried the theme of disability in his political action. That of domestic violence, which he seized at the time when we spoke little about it at LR, is the fruit of his experience as an elected official. A few days after sitting in his chair as mayor, a citizen came to ask for help. “My husband will end up killing me,” she told him. “She was the mother of a childhood friend, I would never have suspected such a thing and I promised myself to carry this fight”, says the deputy of Lot.
This ability to share the hardships of his fellow citizens “immediately seduced” Brigitte Rivière, Aurélien Pradié’s substitute for nine years. “He has a real sincerity and a real closeness with the Lotois who for the most part call him by his first name”, relates the sixty-year-old doctor, admiring “the intensity of the work” and the “thickness” taken by his young Member of Parliament between two legislative campaigns;
“I am not fake ass”
“It’s true that he has become brilliant orally”, also notes Jean-Luc Moudenc who rubbed shoulders with the thirties during the last regional campaign in Occitania. Another campaign lost in advance and that he has, once is not custom, well and truly lost against Carole Delga. “He knew it, but he went there for his family, for his convictions, with courage”, notes the mayor of Toulouse. He also took the opportunity to work on his notoriety outside the Lot. And to refine a lively flayed punch that he reserves for his opponents. “He can be rough, sometimes brittle, recognizes an LR executive and this can affect his ability to federate behind him”. “Let’s say he doesn’t get lost in convolutions. He doesn’t lie, he doesn’t betray, it’s not that common, ”defends Brigitte Rivière. “I’m not fake ass, I don’t want to smile in front and plant in the back”, assumes the deputy.
He says things, even if it means sending his interlocutor for a walk, including when it comes to Jean Castex trying to convert him to macronism in private in an office at Matignon. He often tells this anecdote during meals, no doubt on purpose, to make it clear that he will never be tempted to switch to the presidential camp. Not useless to treat his right with disoriented LR activists. Admirer of Chirac and Séguin, Aurélien Pradié chooses the difficulty by pushing social themes when his rivals rather surf on immigration and insecurity. “I am very firm on these questions too, but if we want to become a popular right again, we must also talk about other wounds”, asserts the one who does not hide his own.