“Libé” returns to meet the French who made the news in our columns to discuss the presidential election. Today Philippe Migny, “angry citizen” and yellow vest since the start of the movement, who “always voted white in the second round”.
One must remember the braziers lit in Arvernian barrels and cardboard shields, fashioned out of the frozen grass. It was in Bourges, in January 2019, in the midst of thousands of yellow vests and songs that we shout to warm up, that we met Philippe Migny for the first time. After a long slalom walk between LBD shots and tear gas canisters, he was there, giving a last helping hand to the gruppettos of wounded and crippled, before the arrival of the pepper cloud and the unleashed peloton.
We will see this affable carpenter dozens of times during the three years that followed November 2018 and the birth of the yellow vests movement. Sometimes happy to have found a job, sometimes again looking for a job. Since October 2020, Philippe has been working in a company that manufactures trailers. If, with his wife Sophie, they now know Paris as their little village in Cher, they have not walked there for a year.
Both of them have long kept a calendar and counted “more than thirty Saturdaysspent demonstrating in the capital. Like many yellow vests encountered by Release, Philip has “waited until the age of 50 before going to demonstrate”. He discovered there “a family”, people from all over France who “all struggle the same way” to end the month, others “in misery”. He also witnessed the violence: “The March 16, 2019 on the Champs-Elysées, I saw people fall next to me, hit by LBD fire or truncheons. And the Motorized Violent Action Repression Squad, rushing into the crowd when nothing was happening at all. At first, I was unaware of the danger. Then we learned to have eyes everywhere.
“A guy like Ruffin would be great”
During a visit to his home in Primelles, during a summer spent at home, the holidays planed the fault of the Saturdays of mop at 450 euros per month, Philippe had entrusted us with his “addiction”. To the demonstrations, to the fervor of the movement. Today, the man is weaned. A bit nostalgic but still the sharp verb against the government and the President, two weeks before the first round, Philippe asks a question: “Who can vote for Macron? There are not that many rich people in France who have an interest in seeing it pass. In 2017, Philippe slipped a ballot in the name of Jean-Luc Mélenchon into the ballot box. “In the second round, I voted blank.”
Also in “Presidential 2022: their say”
For this election, Philippe immediately disqualifies the right: Valérie Pécresse who does not have the build and even less Zemmour. “I have always voted for the left, he repeats. This year, even if it bothers me a little to say it, it will still be Mélenchon for me. It’s not for the character, but for the ideas. We’d take a guy like Ruffin, that would be great. Mélenchon, his big mouth bothers me. He is too much on the offensive, always attacking. He’s kind of hallucinated me for the past five years.” Philippe predicts a duel between the boss of La France insoumise and Marine Le Pen in the second round.
“Those who make money on us by speculating”
“Before being a yellow vest, I am an angry citizen. Three years ago, the price of diesel fuel was an excuse to go out into the street. It was not just that, it was a whole”, says Philip. “After a while, we had to make up our minds”, he admits, aware that the government has never given up in the face of mobilization. Not bitter for all that about what has become of the movement, he shells out too late ideas on the fly. “We would have had to succeed in blocking big things like truckers or farmers do. Not to annoy the people who are going to work but to beat up those who are making money on us by speculating. When you look back, the most beautiful thing that this movement brought me is to have met beautiful people, some wonderful. And to have discovered France with my wife, seen big cities and lived strong moments.
With Sophie, they have three children. Corentin the eldest, studying Japanese in Nantes and Justine, 20, who is interested in musicology. Charlotte, the last, has just turned 6 years old. “My little princess”, he slips, before thinking about the future of the other two. “If Macron comes back and universities become chargeable, logically I will have to choose which of my two children will study. This choice, I will not make. I will go into debt for them. Even if I don’t want to work until I’m 65.”