He had been waiting for this for a long time without really daring to believe it. Azdine Ouis, 44, a community activist from Corbeil-Essonnes for more than twenty years, had distanced himself from French political life. He who still likes to call himself a Gaullist has always believed in the virtue of great men. And he hadn’t seen any great men in the landscape for ages. So, when he heard, on October 12, 2023, the voice of Dominique de Villepin on the airwaves of France Inter, five days after the massacre perpetrated by Hamas causing the death of one thousand two hundred people, he immediately felt a feeling mixed with pride. and relief.
That day, if the former prime minister of Jacques Chirac (from March 2004 to May 2005) said to himself “surprised by the scale, the horror and the barbarity” of the Hamas attack, he admits not having been surprised by “this hatred which was expressed”, straight out of “this open-air prison” what has become of the Gaza Strip. He warns the government of Israel, insisting that “the right to self-defense is not a right to indiscriminate revenge”, at risk “let this all end in a bloodbath.”
The same day, Manuel Bompard, the coordinator of La France insoumise, then mired in a violent controversy since Jean-Luc Mélenchon refused to describe the Islamist organization as terrorist, wrote on X: “It is very useful in these moments to hear the words of Dominique de Villepin. » The first secretary of the Socialist Party, Olivier Faure, also gives his message of support. The right and the majority remain silent, as if Dominique de Villepin had become a political UFO from which we had to keep our distance. At least publicly.
Being a Villepinist means accepting to be alone
Azdine Ouis has not forgotten that he belongs to a strange little political tribe that has fallen into disuse: the Villepinists. It’s neither a movement nor a club, barely a friendly… He knows that we shouldn’t expect many things from the great man: neither gratitude nor a sign of recognition. In 2011, this municipal advisor to Serge Dassault in the municipality of Corbeil joined the small team gathered around the former prime minister to launch his presidential campaign. Azdine Ouis becomes the Mr. Associations and suburbs of the candidate.
He organized a few trips, and then everything stopped suddenly in January 2012, when Dominique de Villepin, not having collected the essential five hundred signatures, was forced to throw in the towel and let his historic enemy, Nicolas Sarkozy, run for office. a second term against François Hollande. Since then, Azdine Ouis has known that being a Villepinist means accepting being alone. But he wants to listen to all these friendly voices who have been urging him for several days to do something. So, on December 3, he decided to launch, all alone in his corner, an online petition to call for the candidacy of Dominique de Villepin for the 2027 presidential election.
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