The leader of the Gaullist party Debout la République (DLR), who is also the mayor of Yerres and a National Assembly representative for the Essonne department, launched his campaign on January 22nd with a meeting in Paris, in front of a thousand of his supporters.
Nicolas Dupont-Aignan is offering electors a “new Europe that will give back freedom of action to the nation-states.”
Photo: Lionel Bonaventure, AFP
Article source: “Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, le souverainiste, veut défendre la « France libre »”, Pascal Charrier, La Croix (22/01/2012)
“Long live Free France!” Rounding off his campaign launch on January 22nd in Paris, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan once again emphasised how unashamedly attached he is to Charles de Gaulle. “I am not nostalgic but I feel I am a guardian of these Gaullist values that we must keep on passing down,” he declared in the Gymnase Marie-Bell Theatre, where there were not enough red velvet seats to accommodate all his supporters.
The fifty year old leader of Debout la République is much too young to have begun his own political career at the time when the hero of “Free France” was still running the country. He began his political career as a bill poster for Jacques Chaban-Delmas in the 1970s and he initially attempted to plough his furrow within “official” Gaullism.
Eurosceptic
Dupont-Aignan, who was born in Paris, has been mayor of Yerres, in the southern suburbs of Paris, since 1995, and a député for Essonne since 1997. When he was first elected it was under the banner of the RPR. After having taken part in the foundation of Charles Pasqua’s RPF, from which he resigned, the graduate of the ENA then joined the brand new UMP. But he walked out in 2007 and turned his “Arise the Republic” club into a party.
A former member of François Bayrou’s staff at the Ministry of Education, he can boast having maintained a certain ideological constancy for close to twenty years. He was a eurosceptic when he opposed the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, and once again in 2005 when he said “no” to the European Constitution; as did Jean-Pierre Chevènement, his left-wing “counterpart”. He remains a declared eurosceptic in 2012.
Nicolas Dupont-Aignan is therefore offering electors a “new Europe that will give back freedom of action to the nation-states.” So what will be his first move, if elected? He will take down the European flag from government buildings and hold a referendum on leaving the eurozone. He demands that the French administration be bound by law to buy French products and he advocates “nationalising EDF-GDF” (the old national gas and electricity company) and “requisitioning” Total in order to better regulate the price of petrol.
Dupont-Aignan claims to have almost reached the required 500 signatures.
In these times of economic and financial crisis, this kind of proposal earns him hearty applause in the plush surroundings of a Parisian theatre. But this right-wing free agent, who targets François Hollande’s supporters as naturally as he does those of Nicolas Sarkozy and François Bayrou, still struggles to get more than 1% of voting intentions, according to pollsters.
If we are to believe the man who portrays himself as the grandson of a first world war pilot and the son of one of the Chasseurs Alpins (the French élite mountain infantry), a world war two POW, the battle is not yet lost. “Don’t be put off by manipulated polls, by the dishonest editors who hold sway over certain parts of the media: keep on working at the grass roots, go on meeting mayors and asking for their backing.”
Nicolas Dupont-Aignan says he is in a much better position now than in 2007 when he had to abandon his run for the presidency. This time he claims already to have all but reached the 500 signatures needed to stand in the first round of the election on April 22nd.
Translation: Fleur Houzé and Noémie Leroy
Editing: Sam Trainor