Primary environmentalists: Yannick Jadot the “unifier” facing the “radicalism” of Sandrine Rousseau – Le Monde

In her dressing room, Sandrine Rousseau dances on I Will Survive of Gloria Gaynor to draw all the available energy from it. In a few moments, she faces Yannick Jadot, for the first debate between the two rounds of the ecological primary, Wednesday, September 22. Thomas Portes, her spokesperson, follows her everywhere: “She confirms what I thought from the start: she will win! “ Two days later, the euphoria had not subsided: ” It is powerful what is happening around my candidacy, assures the ecofeminist. There is a breath. I will carry it to the end. “

The day before the debate, Yannick Jadot has small eyes and he is looking at a brick. Not just any brick, an ecological brick. At the start of this crucial week for political ecology, he came to visit, in Sevran (Seine-Saint-Denis), a brickyard “Which manufactures bricks made of earth and not of cement, which emits a lot of CO₂. The company creates jobs… The perfect model ”. These days, before going to bed, he reads a few pages of a biography of Mussolini, but his heart is not there. For the moment, rather than on Rome, he walks in Sevran with his shoulders slumped a little. Slack. Before the primary, he said that the more voters there were, the more likely he was to make the hole in the first round. With 27.7%, he is ahead of Sandrine Rousseau (25.1%) by two points and dust. It is as if he had received a cinder block on his face: “I don’t do the accounts. For the second round, I don’t know. But I am determined. “

He is right, the slightest prognosis is adulterated, impossible to know what will decide the 122,670 registered. To make matters worse, on Monday, the meeting with Eric Piolle and the telephone conversation with Delphine Batho, in an attempt to rally them to her green plume, failed. Neither of the two beaten in the first round will take the slightest risk of supporting one or the other. As usual, the MEP relies on publicized travel. During the week he repeated the word dozens of times “Gathering” to bring ecology to the Elysée. He got annoyed with that of “Radicalism” whose ears are rebuffed and this false trial in ecological shyness. “The challenge of the campaign is not to say ‘radicalism’ every two sentences, asserts Alexis Braud, his close advisor. The ecological transition is radical in essence. Yannick Jadot, at Greenpeace and elsewhere, has been doing this all his life. “

Two opposing views

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