Paris (AFP)
"The target is particularly badly chosen".
If the mayor of Paris denounces on the whole the occupation by squatters of a room of the restaurant Le Petit Cambodge, hit by the attacks of 2015, the opposition sees a new line of fracture between socialists and environmentalists.
In recent months, the tone has risen several times between the socialist mayor Anne Hidalgo and her Green allies on the Christophe Girard affair, questions of secularism or the relationship with the Republic.
The affair of Petit Cambodge, where fifteen people were killed in the attacks of November 2015, today offers a new angle of attack to the right-wing opposition.
Since mid-November, the premises in which the restaurant in the 10th arrondissement plans to open an annex have been occupied by an activist collective which accommodates the homeless and isolated people.
This collective deplores the fact that the premises have been abandoned for five years and says it is fighting against the "gentrification" of the neighborhood for the benefit of "speculators", the AirBnb platform or "luxury and bobo restaurants".
They “changed the locks, painted the walls” and “organized aperitifs” in the midst of the Covid-19 crisis, regret the owners of Petit Cambodge who have taken legal action.
The occupants will know next Monday if they are evicted.
In the meantime, they organized Tuesday evening, after the hearing before the Paris judicial court, a traveling concert against gentrification and in support of the squat, at the invitation of the collective of associations "l'Arche-lesRévolté.es de the place Sainte-Marthe ".
About twenty people were fined by the police who then dispersed the demonstration.
The controversy has shifted to the political field after the deputy environmentalist at the town hall of the 14th arrondissement of Paris, Guillaume Durand said earlier this week on the LCI set to support "the squat method".
The Secretary of State for the Social, Solidarity and Responsible Economy Olivia Grégoire (LREM) immediately saw it as a "shame", while Aurore Bergé, LREM MP for Yvelines called on Anne Hidalgo to clarify the "line "of the majority.
But it is especially the right which seized the subject to try to drive a new wedge between socialists and ecologists in Paris.
- "Very shocking" -
"Considering that private property is not a fundamental right" is one of the "real issues" between the "socialist" and "environmental" groups of the town hall, assures AFP Nelly Garnier, LR advisor in Paris close to Rachida Dati.
Senator LR Valérie Boyer denounces, on Twitter, "the complicity" of "the voiceless left" in the face of "EELV which endorses this vandalism and encourages squatting".
The right also points to the discretion of Anne Hidalgo who contented herself with retweeting messages condemning the occupation.
The PS mayor of the 10th arrondissement Alexandra Cordebard wants to be firmer with AFP by lambasting an "illegal" and "very shocking" squat as to the symbol, while the name of the restaurant has become synonymous with the jihadist attacks which left 130 dead in the capital and in Saint-Denis in 2015.
But, she assures, there is not for all that reason to "create" a political subject within the majority which has "much to do together" to "put in place the common program".
The headliner of the Greens in Paris, David Belliard, advocates before AFP "that a solution be created" which allows everyone to "come out on top".
But he also considers the debate "legitimate and normal" and regrets that nobody is moved that "for five years", a room was left "unoccupied" in a district marked by "social distress" and "which is so in need. " associations.
For another partner of the majority, the communist Ian Brossat, "the target" of Little Cambodia is however "particularly poorly chosen", he told AFP, because of "the symbolic charge" and because s to take it out on restaurateurs "in the current period is completely absurd".
"I do not see" "how this initiative makes it possible to fight against gentrification", explains the elected official for whom "the best way to fight" are social housing which "environmentalists" "have opposed" on several occasions.
© 2021 AFP