The cameras focused on LFI deputy Sébastien Delogu on Tuesday, in the middle of a question session with the government, when he brandished a Palestinian flag in the National Assembly. The action followed an intervention by another LFI MP regarding the deadly strike on a camp for displaced Palestinians in Rafah which sparked international outrage.
The 36-year-old deputy from Bouches-du-Rhône, who was excluded from the work of the Hemicycle for fifteen sitting days and will be deprived of half of the parliamentary allowance for two months, is still little known to the general public . But who is he exactly?
“I have known the misery of the world”
Sébastien Delogu was born in 1987 in Marseille and grew up in the northern districts, the constituency where he was elected. His father, of Armenian and Italian origin, is a taxi driver and his mother, Algerian and Spanish, is a seamstress. In 2012, aged 25, he was evicted from his home with his wife and their two young children. At the same time, he got involved in the National Housing Confederation union.
“I have known the misery of the world, and see it around me,” he assured in an interview given to 20 minutes. Ten months before his election, he was still sleeping in his car due to lack of accommodation. “I experienced a monumental ordeal, and now it’s over,” he explained to 20 minutes.
The driver of Jean-Luc Mélenchon
A former taxi driver, like his father, he became a Marseille delegate in the Taxi de France assembly. In his fight against VTCs, he met Danielle Simonnet, at the time coordinator of LFI. During Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s legislative campaign in 2017, in Marseille, she introduced him to the boss of LFI.
Sébastien Delogu has long been presented as Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s personal driver. “But he was never paid for that,” assured Lise Maillard, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s chief of staff, to 20 minutes. “He wanted to be an activist without being paid, to forget about looking for work, with generosity and selfless sincerity. »
Several highlights
Since his election in June 2022, Sébastien Delogu has been talked about several times, notably after having shouted “racists” in the middle of the chamber during an intervention by LR Michèle Tabarot in favor of the denunciation of the agreement between France and Algeria on immigration. The MP then lost 25% of his monthly allowance.
This time the deputy for Bouches-du-Rhône received the maximum sanction provided for within the National Assembly. A sanction that he describes as a “medal”. “It’s a medal because there is a massacre right now in Palestine and France is complicit in what is happening there,” he explained at the LCP microphone before adding “it is necessary that strong symbols are made and I have taken the heavy responsibility.”