Paris (AFP)
The former vice-president of the Hauts-de-France region and head of EELV Sandrine Rousseau, who left politics in 2017 after the Baupin affair, announced Monday to party activists to be a candidate for the 2021 primary for the presidential election.
MEP Yannick Jadot and Grenoble mayor Eric Piolle have already announced their intention to compete.
Sandrine Rousseau had decided to leave the party because it was "difficult to stay in a structure in which sexual violence has been denounced", explains Sandrine Rousseau in a letter sent to activists, of which AFP has obtained a copy.
She refers to the accusations of sexual assault and harassment that she and several other women of the party had formulated against the former deputy of Paris Denis Baupin, in the press in 2016. The case, prescribed, had been dismissed but a defamation lawsuit brought by Mr. Baupin in April 2019 resulted in his conviction for abusive proceedings.
"I come back with the desire to be a candidate for the primary of the ecologists for the next presidential election (of 2022)", which will be held between June and September 2021, says Sandrine Rousseau in her letter Monday, confirming information from Figaro.
“I who claimed to help women, what message was I sending them by abandoning the political terrain to which I had nevertheless chosen to devote a considerable part of my life?” Explains the former deputy national secretary and spokesperson for 'EELV.
"Over the past three years, I have remained an ecologist, an economist, always a specialist in environmental economics", assures the one who also founded an association to fight against sexual and gender-based violence, "Speak".
"The time must come for ecology to gain access to power. To better change it but also to deploy a requirement for emancipatory, plural, imaginative and creative transformation", adds Sandrine Rousseau.
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