Swill he be the candidate of the Yellow Vests? If other presidential contenders defend their claims, Fabrice Grimal prides himself on being the only one to have demonstrated alongside them and to offer the most detailed program. Confident, he has already reserved the Dome room in Pontoise “for a giant meeting” in March, and this, even if he is absolutely not guaranteed to have the 500 sponsorships required. “This system is a trap: without anonymity, it cannot work. The mayors are on their guard, ”he squeaks. Also the candidate is betting on a collective of “resistant mayors” launched by two city councilors from the Ardennes, who denounce the vaccination pass and wish to restore a democracy “confiscated by Emmanuel Macron and part of the media”.
From Essec to Yellow Vests
Listening to Fabrice Grimal unfold his career, one wonders what can bring him closer to these elected officials. A child from Seine-Saint-Denis, a scholarship holder from the Henri-IV high school and holder of an MBA from Essec, this 30-year-old at the head of Sing City, a Parisian team building agency, has more of a first-class profile. of rope. “But he has always been revolted, and politics fascinates him. We, his friends, have been pushing him to move up a gear for a long time, ”explains Nicolas, who founded Sing City with him, when they left Essec.
They are unknown to the general public, have no chance of winning and have nevertheless decided to embark on the battle for the presidential election. What motivates them? What do they recommend? Point went to meet these small candidates with big ambitions.
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Fabrice Grimal has been testing the militant grounds for a while now. First involved in the Republican People’s Union when it was created by François Asselineau, he then foraged with the UMP and the PS, while attending meetings of Mélenchon and Dupont-Aignan. He picks up contacts there and polishes another vision of the world. “After having voted yes in the 2005 referendum on the Constitution for Europe, he realized the brainwashing he had been the victim of”, says Nicolas. “From this betrayal of democracy to the 2008 crisis which swung middle-class French people into the proletariat, I saw the arrival of the Yellow Vests movement,” adds the presidential candidate. A few months before its launch, Fabrice Grimal publishes Towards revolution. What if France rose up again? (ed. Jean-Cyrille Godefroy), prophetic essay written between 2014 and 2018, in which he predicts an uprising in peripheral France.
“The man who whispers in the ear of yellow vests”
Defining himself as a revolutionary – “not in the Trotskyist sense, but because it’s the only way to get things moving” – he naturally joined the Yellow Vests. He distributes his book to media figures of the movement, which allows him to get closer in particular to Priscillia Ludosky and Jérôme Rodrigues. On his HQ media, journalist Aude Lancelin presents him as “the man who whispers in the ear of yellow vests”, “an absurd title when you know that this movement and its supposed leaders are perfectly indomitable”, he writes in its logbook published in 2021, A year in yellow (ed. Free Perspectives).
However, he will try to tame some of them by his contribution to the “real debate”, organized in response to the national “great debate”. With about twenty motivated people chosen from among 500 people drawn by lot, it constitutes “the govt” on the model of English-style shadow cabinets, an alternative government, therefore endowed with its own ministers and its own program. When he was appointed to represent it – “nobody else wanted to go there” – he assumed to put an end to the horizontality so dear to the movement, surrounded himself with a small team and created a party, La Concorde citizen.
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Approached to take care of social cohesion, Jérôme Rodrigues winced: “They are good comrades in the fight, but they scare me, because they will not be able to get the 500 signatures, and the politicians will then send back to the ropes explaining to us that we are not representative. Rather than the presidential election, I had advised them to run for the legislative elections. “But Fabrice Grimal thinks his time has come. He presents himself as the candidate of the “real historical yellow vests”. Proof of this is his program oriented towards social and fiscal justice: restoration of the ISF, introduction of a micro-tax on financial transactions, elimination of tax loopholes… A project that aims to be radical by proposing to introduce the RIC, to abolish the regions, to elect the Keeper of the Seals by universal suffrage “to ensure the independence of justice” and to launch a process of “de-globalization”.Convinced by Brexit, Fabrice Grimal wants to get France out of the European Union – “an anti-democratic American-business thing, which only serves the lobbies” –, but also from NATO and all the free trade treaties. The Essec graduate also proposes the creation of a sovereign French Internet to put an end to “the censorship of Gafam and their algorithms which make us invisible”.
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Not vaccinated “but not antivax”, he was immunized by catching Omicron, “a joke”, he says. He assures us straight in the eye that he is not a conspirator, but that he analyzes the management of the health crisis as “a totalitarian delirium” and devotes boundless hatred to Emmanuel Macron. “He called us illiterate, nothing, and now he wants to piss off the unvaccinated, I have no respect for him anymore. His friend Nicolas describes him as an “emotional” who has “difficulty with compromise”.
Since the renunciation of Arnaud Montebourg, no more candidate finds favor in his eyes. If Macron is re-elected, Fabrice Grimal will always be able to rely on his last prophecy which concludes his book Towards the revolution : an imminent financial crisis which would provoke a new uprising in 2023, culminating in the capture of the National Assembly and the dismissal of Emmanuel Macron. Revolutionary Fabien Grimal? This is a euphemism to hide his ambition to see an insurrectionary movement sweep over France…