And now, in the middle of a press conference on September 8 to review the start of the school year, we feel like teleported to Galeries Lafayette.
Cheap suits!
Rodrigo Arenas, the president of the FCPE, the main federation of parents of public pupils, is dressing for the winter all the National Education and, first of all, its leader, Jean-Michel Blanquer.
"Enough of these vulgar announcements!"
Either they are irresponsible or they are incapable!
He launches, with the output of an overspeed sewing machine.
The anecdote makes one of his friends laugh.
"He's like that, Rodrigo, he's a Latin!"
He has convictions!
“For two years at the head of the FCPE, Arenas, 46, father of three boys, lets go of his blows orally, and now in writing.
Freshly returned to the congress of the federation, campaigning for the elections of parents' delegates, which are being held this Friday October 9 and Saturday October 10 everywhere in France, he has just published with two co-authors Edouard Gaudot and Nathalie Laville, “Dessine -moi un futur ", (Ed. Actes Sud, 120 p. 16 euros), a plea for a" school-house ".
The play on words is transparent: before being the nervous gun-bearer of the parents of pupils, this son of Chilean refugees, raised in the bars of the red suburbs during the 1980s, made his ideological weapons among the Communists, then with the Greens.
He no longer has his card, but still convictions, he pleads, as well as a hen in the garden of his pavilion in Sevran in Seine-Saint-Denis, on this edge of the outer suburbs where housing estates grow at the edge of fields.
He assumes to "do politics, lobbying"
A permanent candidate, Arenas certainly is.
At the Ministry of National Education, we even recently scrutinized the statutes of the FCPE to verify whether the appearance of his name on a regional list would be compatible with his associative job.
It is.
But he won't go.
"I am against the accumulation of mandates and what we have engaged here, at the FCPE, is too important, I do not betray the people I take into fights", assures Arenas, wedged in his living room, similar to that of so many families.
There are Lego, magnets on the fridge, little pencil lines on the kitchen door frame, witnesses to the time passing on growing children.
At the start of the school year, the eldest entered high school, the younger one in CP.
"I am a simple parent of a student", he often begins, before unrolling his punchlines, skated by the "art of the valve" of the cities, and more worked than it seems.
"I put the words so that it is understood by the general public.
We must not take people for idiots.
Every morning, I drop my kids off at school at 7.20 am and we go around the news.
I spend my life doing that, ”he says, fully assuming“ doing politics, lobbying ”at the FCPE, on the grounds that“ school is the Republic ”and that all subjects of society end up entering it.
His commitment to education, he dates family meals with his parents, who became specialized educators after the downgrading of exile - in Chile, they were sociologists and nursery directors.
“When I listened to my parents, it gave me the keys to understanding how my friends from the city, one by one, were being kicked out of the school system,” explains Arenas.
To say that if we do everything right, we will go to college, that's not true.
You have to know the codes.
He went there at the Sorbonne.
He forged "weapons to build his thought", without completing his thesis on economic planning.
"Rodrigo, he is capable of setting fire"
"He has a background and he is very political, this is his main quality: having people who know how to put things in perspective, so that we better understand where we are, it has become rare", praises Stéphane Gatignon, the former mayor (EELV) of Sevran, who took Arenas under his political wing in Seine-Saint-Denis before they separated a few years ago, “not angry, but, you understand, everyone lives their life… "
Other fellow travelers have much less pleasant memories.
"Rodrigo, he is capable of setting fire, I am very happy that he is no longer with us," blows, on condition of anonymity, an activist from Europe Ecology-the Greens.
“At the FCPE, he jostled lots of old activists who were waiting their turn, and why?
To strike, "continues the same, with in mind the controversy over the headscarf relaunched in 2019 by a poster of the FCPE, showing a veiled mother with this slogan:" Yes, I'm going on a school trip, so what?
"
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Another activist jokes: “He found the FCPE to exist, in the parties he is toast.
The interested party, in mirror, judges the devices "late" and cramped.
“It is in civil society that it is happening now!
“And in Seine-Saint-Denis, particularly for Arenas, who has established his power in this department and has solid support there, as well as his job, responsible for the departmental council for 15 years.
"It's like a father to us"
Hanaine Ben Hadj, president of the local FCPE de Villepinte union, learned about activism at her side.
“Now I know where to tap to be successful,” she says.
And as soon as we come up against a wall, he does the best he can to help.
It's like a father to us.
"
After a first unsuccessful attempt, Rodrigo Arenas delighted in 2018 the head of the national federation, at the cost of a joint co-presidency with another elected member of the Parisian suburbs, Carla Dugault, from Essonne and much more discreet publicly.
"It is a sum of interests well understood, but it is Rodrigo Arenas who has the power, and who fully plays the card of the cleavage", analyzes a connoisseur of the school world.
He judges the man “clever”, but his nervous presence has not yet made it possible to stem the slow erosion which nibbles at parents' federations every year, in favor of independent lists and less structured collectives.
In the last elections, the association, which remains the first in France, garnered only 11% of the votes in primary education, and 40% in colleges and high schools.
This is about four and six points lower than in 2013.
Parents of pupils: elections, instructions for use
How to vote?
In schools, colleges and high schools, elections are organized every year to elect representatives of parents of pupils.
For the 2020-2021 school year, they take place on Friday 9 and Saturday 10 October.
Each of the two parents is a voter and eligible, but has only one vote, regardless of the number of their children enrolled in the same establishment.
The vote is personal: impossible to give a proxy.
Parents can vote on site by visiting the establishment on voting days or by mail by sending the ballot before the closing time.
2019-2020 results.
Last year, more than six million parents of students voted to elect their representatives in schools.
In the first stage, the lists of parents not constituted in associations had gathered 63.80% of the votes, the non-affiliated local associations, 16.27%, the FCPE, 11%, the union lists, 5.36%, Peep, 2.01%, UNAAPE, 1.56%.
In the second degree, the FCPE won 40.83% of the vote, the unaffiliated local associations, 19.80%, the lists of parents not constituted in associations, 19.06%, the Peep, 10.61%, the union lists, 6.91%, UNAAPE, 2.79%.