• Eric Piolle is a candidate for the ecological primary organized at the end of September, seven months before the presidential election.

  • Grenoble mayor EELV will face at least two other candidates, economist Sandrine Rousseau and MEP Yannick Jadot.

  • He answers questions from

    20 Minutes

    on his presidential program and his method of federating a “humanist arc” with a view to 2022.

He left the Alps for a media tour in Paris.

Eric Piolle, mayor of Europe Ecologie-Les Verts de Grenoble since 2014, announced Tuesday his candidacy for the ecological primary, the day before the release of his presidential program book,

Hope! *

.

The former multinational executive highlights his experience as a local elected official to distinguish himself from his two declared competitors, Yannick Jadot and Sandrine Rousseau, as well as his measures to reform democracy.

He answered the questions of

20 Minutes

this Thursday in Paris.

What is ecology according to Eric Piolle?

I'm not sure there are any major substantive differences between the candidates.

Our political space offers very homogeneous solutions on social, climate and democratic issues.

An application is a vision, a method and an embodiment.

In fact, it is on the method and the embodiment that the choice will be made.

How are your method and your incarnation different?

My political ecology is to federate and exercise power. I am not an environmental activist from the start, and when I got involved in 2010 [at the regional], the historic green people were confined to the functions of whistleblowers and counter-powers. Today, I am here to federate a humanist arc, as in Grenoble in 2014 and in 2020. I come to bring this experience of victory, of the exercise of power, validated by my re-election in 2020. I also have this in relation to the territories, far from the Parisian spheres, this anchoring of local elected officials.

What characterizes me is the collective work, I am a team leader.

It is extremely important for France to get out of this monarchical or Jupiterian power, embodied by Emmanuel Macron.

I also want to embody consistency in these troubled times, when some let themselves be carried away by the ambient climate.

Your flagship measure does not concern ecology but institutions, with the organization of a constitutional referendum.

Why ?

My diagnosis is that after the 30 Glorious Years, we had 40 years where the authorities were powerless to propose a project of progress, on the climate, unemployment, the relationship of society to living beings.

We must rehabilitate the idea of ​​progress: we can live better in the future, differently, but better.

For that, let's get out of Jupiter's power.

I will use article 11 of the Constitution to organize a referendum as soon as the legislative elections [in June 2022] and create a rapid shock to unlock democracy.

It will focus on the introduction of the climate in article 1 of the Constitution [which defines the fundamental principles of the Republic], the separation of justice and the executive power, the creation of the citizens' initiative referendum (RIC), the limitation of the powers of the president, and proportional to the National Assembly.

Is it a transition to a Sixth Republic, after all?

Without having to wait.

The Sixth Republic may be an interesting step, but it would take at least two years.

What would be your first ecological measure?

We must contain the powers of money, speculative, which explode social inequalities and are predatory in the face of climate and life.

I will establish a climate TFR to tax the richest, proposed by Greenpeace.

Are you going to speak to environmental sympathizers or to all French people?

The two discourses are not disconnected.

What strikes me, in the history of environmentalists, is that the political surface is immensely larger and more diverse than the base of activists.

What I did in Grenoble was to reconcile the two, by tracing a path: the exercise of power.

Yannick Jadot and his teams fear a too “restricted” primary, which would only attract activists.

Do you have a participation goal?

No.

The open primary is the best choice, because there is no natural candidate.

I will try to involve as many people from the outside as possible to come and vote for me.

You are going on a summer tour with the French, is it to make yourself better known?

You are less well known than Yannick Jadot ...

Notoriety is not a problem.

What works is the environmental candidacy, whatever it is.

What is tested in the polls is not so much a name as a green application.

Yannick Jadot has had two national campaigns, the presidential election of 2017, even if he was not at the end, and the Europeans of 2019. It gives another media surface, but that's not what creates the future.

Moreover, according to surveys, the French are ready to choose someone new, who has experience in the private sector.

I have the experience of the private and locally elected, the novelty, so it works.

Should an ecological presidential candidate, as Yannick Jadot tells

L'Obs

, sometimes go into "uncomfortable situations", such as the police demonstration a few weeks ago in Paris?

I talk to the police and as a local elected official, I am in contact with them every day.

But I decided not to go to this demonstration, because you have to be careful with who you demonstrate, and for what demands.

There, they were corporatists, and in the presence of Gerald Darmanin.

It is scandalous to see the Minister of the Interior demonstrate against the Ministry of Justice.

We must be vigilant on this.

In times when things are moving, you have to keep your cool and not let yourself be tossed about.

Does ecology, to win, have to go through the union of the left?

This is not a prerequisite, because union for union, the left has had enough for the past forty years.

Winning as in 2012, and after?

To do what ?

If I get involved in politics, it is to change my life.

You have to unite behind a project.

With whom ?

Look at the people who supported me in the municipal elections, it went from Matthieu Orphelin to François Ruffin and Clémentine Autain, with trade unionists, NGOs.

This project must also be supported by the marches for the climate, #MeToo, the “yellow vests”, the members of the Citizen's Convention for the climate.

Otherwise it will not work for the campaign or for the exercise of the mandate.

When we have won, the reactions of the lobbies will be even more violent than those against the socialists in 1981. If we are not firmly anchored with civil society and the trade union world, we will quickly be swept aside.

Clémentine Autain, François Ruffin, it will be hard to convince them when Jean-Luc Mélenchon is already a candidate, right?

We'll see… [He smiles]

A support forum was published on Thursday for a candidacy from Anne Hidalgo.

Could you support her if she is better placed than you?

Just look at the list of his supporters.

It is the socialists who support the socialists, as we saw at the last regional ones.

Where they are outgoing, they support each other and fail to unite.

But there is no socialist aspiration in France, I have not felt it in the country.

You said in 2020 that you were a “partner” of Medef Isère.

Is your ecology compatible with the liberal economy?

The economy must be at the service of three objectives: guaranteeing security (food, housing, physical), cherishing common goods and living things, and nourishing our desire for meaning, because we also derive from our economic activity a feeling of utility.

The parties of the left and the right have tended to kneel before the economy, out of fascination, because many are professionals of politics, they do not have my experience.

I was a senior executive in the industry [at Hewlett Packard].

It is normal to be in contact with the economic world and to speak with the Medef, it is my world.

Is it an asset compared to other environmentalists?

In relation to the entire political class.

The politicians having exercised responsibilities in the private sector, there are few.

Your opponents sometimes describe you as a Khmer Vert, anti-consumerist, anti-5G.

How not to be the candidate of an Amish ecology, as Emmanuel Macron described it?

I am not going to define myself in relation to the caricature that is made of me.

These people used to treat us as baba-coolers, beatniks, rowdy teenagers.

Amish is when we started to take power.

They call me “Piolle-pot”, “ayatollah”, “Khmer vert”… I have the whole collection.

A world is panicking because the neoliberal model is making fewer and fewer winners.

In an interview with

Elle

published this Thursday, Emmanuel Macron ...

Ah yes, it's incredible, I saw that he returned to the "crop tops".

What is this two-ball morality?

I have four children, three daughters, they dress as they want.

What does the president want, give the uniforms back to school?

And decide what is good to wear for a woman and a man?

We were going to ask you what you shared the president's fears about a society which "is gradually becoming racialized" ...

France is threatened by the choice it has made to fracture the country, notably with the “separatism” law.

This political novelty is in fact a total confusion with the values ​​of the National Rally.

Will the presidential election be played on the ecological question or the identity question?

I will fight so that it is not on the question of identity.

There are three social projects, Emmanuel Macron's neoliberal project: adapting France to the way the world goes, to this law of the jungle.

The identity project, of the far right and the reactionary right, that LR seems to have chosen.

And the humanist project.

“More links less goods,” as Ruffin puts it.

I will fight for this project to win.

*

Hope!

For an ecological Republic

, The links that liberate, June 30, 2021.

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Presidential 2022: The mayor of Grenoble Eric Piolle candidate via the environmentalist primary

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  • EELV

  • Presidential election

  • Primary ecologist

  • Eric Piolle