Delegate vice-president of LR and deputy of Loir-et-Cher, Guillaume Peltier offers half-price motorways this summer to promote "tourist patriotism". And he wants an international health tribunal to try China.
You will table a motion for a resolution targeting China on Monday: what are you asking for?
GUILLAUME PELTIER. We have the right to know why China and the World Health Organization (WHO) lied. The WHO, with its 7000 employees, its 6 billion dollars budget, took up the arguments of China like a parrot. I want to understand the failings or faults of a state and an international organization.
Which ones?
First, why do the Covid-19 death figures in China seem so low? Why have Chinese authorities censored whistleblowers, minimized the dangers of coronavirus? Why the WHO, probably aware of the first cases in China since last fall, never transmitted the information to other states, why did it not ring the world alarm bell at the first alerts? Why have the leaders of the European Union been so absent? There are many questions related to the attitude of many bureaucrats around the world. It is essential to create an international health court, on the model of the International Criminal Court created in The Hague in 1998.
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In the middle of a pandemic, is the urgency really to set up a court?
The role of a political leader is to manage the consequences of a crisis, but also to understand and address the causes so that it does not happen again. The United Nations must commit to creating such a tribunal.
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What do you expect from the government, to whom is your resolution addressed?
France must intervene thanks to its historic status as a permanent member of the UN Security Council to convince our partners. It is time to audition and judge the WHO bureaucrats we are funding.
On another level, you are also tabling a resolution encouraging “tourist patriotism”: in concrete terms, what do you propose?
At a time when all workers, entrepreneurs, artisans, traders, workers, caregivers, the heroes of the national daily life, the ropeway circles, participate in the effort, I hope that the rentiers do it too.
Who are the annuitants?
Highway companies, for example. I am struck by their lack of involvement. These are about twenty companies which share a cake of 27 billion euros in profits distributed since 2006. One km of motorway generates 350,000 euros in profit. These companies have allowed themselves since 2006 to increase the price of tolls by 20%, twice the inflation. Since there is a need for an electric shock, and since tourism is one of the most threatened sectors, it is important that the motorway companies participate in the safeguarding of holidays in France.
How? 'Or' What ?
That the government forces them to halve the cost of tolls between July 1 and September 30, 2020. This would facilitate the movement - when authorized - of our compatriots on the roads of France: 9000 km of motorways half awards to support the tourism economy. The state could threaten to impose an exceptional tax on their parent companies to force them to make such a commitment.
Putting streams of cars on the roads is not very ecological…
To save the tourism economy, which concerns 4 million jobs and 8% of the national wealth. Ecology is central, but it must also support the local economy. It must be settled more by the powerful, multinationals and States, and a little less by the citizens. And there will likely be fewer foreign tourist cars.
Why not renationalise them? It was Villepin's right that privatized them, was that a mistake?
As early as 2006 I denounced this decision. The new generation of Republicans is Gaullist: with Christian Jacob, we are attached to the strategic state. But renationalization is a pipe dream, it would be too expensive. This crisis reveals the urgent need to return to the Gaullist filiation. For too long the French have had no choice but between the financial, bureaucratic and above-ground globalism of Emmanuel Macron or the nationalism of the extremes. The only answer to these ideologies is patriotism, it is Gaullism.
The right of the next world, is it the return of Gaullism from the 1960s?
There are eternal ideas that allowed France to recover after the war. All the keywords of Gaullism are Macron's taboo words: sovereignty, nation, people, value of work, provinces, are not bad words. The right of tomorrow wants to rebuild the nation and protect the people.
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