Paris (AFP)

It is one of the initiators of the project of referendum on the privatization of Aéroports de Paris which could pass on Wednesday the cap of the million of supports: Boris Vallaud, figure of the small remaining group of PS deputies, defends a "true policy of left ", without sparing his former friends past the majority.

The idea of ​​the referendum was born in the "non-gendered" toilets of the Palais Bourbon in early 2019, recalls amused spokesman for the PS group of the Assembly and the Socialist Party: "Valérie Rabault (president of the group), Marie -Christine Dalloz (LR) and I mentioned "the ongoing debate on the privatization of ADP.

"There should be a referendum," said Dalloz. "A referendum of shared initiative (RIP)," suggested PS elected officials who had already tried to initiate this unprecedented procedure to restore the end of 2018 wealth tax (ISF), without achieving it.

This time will be the right one. Some 250 parliamentarians (well over the fifth required by the Constitution) support the operation. To be effectively organized, the RIP must still obtain the approval of 10% of the electorate or 4.7 million people.

"Emmanuel Macron has set itself to one million the gauge of the seriousness of the case," says Boris Vallaud, in reference to the commitment made after the great national debate to lower the number of supports required. "When this course is crossed, it will be difficult for him to consider that it is only a political coup".

"ADP is a company of national interest, a monopoly, a developer in the heart of the Ile-de-France project," argues the 44-year-old elected to the Landes as a wise young man, who worked at the Elysée under François Hollande, seeing in this subject one of the ideological markers he likes.

- Placid but acidic -

Since his arrival at the Palais Bourbon in a stricken group, rose from 290 to thirty members in June 2017, Boris Vallaud has voted against trust to Edouard Philippe twice. He has fought against public service reforms, unemployment insurance, the ratification of the Ceta Free Trade Agreement or immigration measures, denouncing the "dangerous strabismus" of a president who looks "to the extreme right".

Emmanuel Macron, of the same class as him at ENA, is a "populist president" in his eyes. "I feel socialist, left, in a serious moment when the Republic is consumed by both ends: RN and LREM," he told AFP.

Of a reserved nature, the husband of the former Minister of Education Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, defeated her in the legislative elections of 2017, was able to split the armor while preserving his private life as a father of two children.

Born in Beirut, son of the historian Pierre Vallaud, he dreamed of being a cook in his youth. A master of public law, Sciences Po where he meets his wife and the ENA: here he is on the rails of a life of high official.

But his meeting with two elephants of the PS will change everything: Arnaud Montebourg, he follows the General Council of Saone-et-Loire and Bercy, and Henri Emmanuelli, who pushes him to present himself in his fief Landes.

Called at the Elysee Palace in 2014 as Deputy Secretary General and then as advisor to François Hollande at the end of 2016, he says he played a role "of hair scratching", but sometimes withholding his "reservations and doubts".

After the fiasco of the PS in the presidential election, he starts the legislative because there was no question of "desert", confide his wife.

"When I arrived in the hemicycle, I saw a lot of socialists fall in my arms and said to me: it's less bad than I thought, then they sat in the ranks of En Marche with Darmanin and The Mayor "still remembers, between bitterness and combativeness, who has since become one of the architects of the socialist project under construction.

"Boris is as precise as he is precious, a pillar of the new direction," greets PS First Secretary Olivier Faure.

"He is certainly intelligent but sometimes a bit limited in his dealings with the majority." One feels a bit sarcastic. "Even when he nods behind the scenes, he still hits like a deaf man," regrets an ex-socialist who has been in En Marche. .

© 2019 AFP