Pierre Liscia is spokesperson for the “Libres!” Movement by Valérie Pécresse and author of "La Honte" (Albin Michel).
FIGAROVOX.
- This morning on RTL, the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, accused you of being behind the #SaccageParis campaign.
Are you, as she implies, the initiator?
Pierre LISCIA.
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I discovered the existence of this hashtag "Saccage Paris" this weekend when it was in the trends of the most shared keywords of the moment on Twitter and while some accounts close to the mayor of Paris accused me of to be behind this operation.
My first tweet on this subject was also to deny these unfounded accusations.
At that time, #SaccageTwitter was already massively relayed and did not need my help to achieve this visibility.
If you go back to the history of the hashtag, it was tweeted for the first time on March 21 and was relayed mainly by personal accounts of ordinary Parisians.
Today, no political apparatus is capable of organizing a digital campaign of this scale: more than 30,000 tweets published, several hundred thousand shares and times in the national and international press.
No offense to the mayor of Paris, I am not the great orchestrator of this operation.
It's giving me too much importance!
The first person in charge of #SaccageParis is the mayor of Paris herself: if she had been able to guarantee Parisians a clean and beautiful city, this hashtag would never have seen the light of day.
The first person in charge of #SaccageParis is the mayor of Paris herself: if she had been able to guarantee Parisians a clean and beautiful city, this hashtag would never have seen the light of day.
The inelegance of her words and the virulence of her charge towards me reveal a great excitement: she prefers to attack those who denounce the reality of her own carelessness rather than to question herself and bring to Parisians concrete answers to their legitimate demands.
As for her attempt to discredit all those who do not agree with her by associating them with the right or the far right, it is a way of locking oneself in denial and refusing to answer on the bottom.
It is very contemptuous and I regret it.
Parisians deserve better than that.
The aspiration to live in a beautiful, clean and well-kept city is not a question of left or right.
It is a question of respect for Parisians.
All the same, you have widely relayed the hashtag "Saccage Paris", what reproaches do you make against the mayor of Paris?
I only posted six tweets about it.
On the other hand, I did give my support to this movement to free the voice of Parisians who can no longer stand living in a degraded, unhealthy environment, with unmaintained urban facilities and abandoned roads.
The first of the competences of a mayor is to preserve the living environment and public health.
However, since 2014, Ms. Hidalgo has proven to be completely incapable of assuming this responsibility.
#SaccageParis is only limited to the question of cleanliness.
It is more broadly a denunciation of the general ugliness of our capital linked to dubious urban planning choices, disastrous development projects and disastrous road management.
#SaccageParis is a denunciation of the general ugliness of our capital linked to dubious urban planning choices, disastrous development projects and disastrous road management.
In recent years, Parisians have seen the number of urban wrecks multiply: installations of giant flowerpots that become infamous dumpsites, feet of trees supposedly transformed into urban vegetable gardens that become gaping and muddy holes in the roadway, ecological street furniture which is nothing but a messy tangle of recycled wooden pallets and which literally rots on the public road, vestiges of failed attempts at revegetation which are nothing more than rusty and unsightly metal frames.
Not to mention the chronic lack of road maintenance: broken or dismembered traffic lights, patched up with large blows of adhesive tapes, posts torn off that are never replaced, potholes that are multiplying, rutted cycle lane dividers litter the roadway, abandoned construction palisades on every street corner, etc.
In short, cleanliness is a huge reason for dissatisfaction with Parisians, but it is not the only one.
The reality is that Parisians and today the French are disgusted to see the state of disrepair of the capital of France.
Everyone makes the same observation, except the mayor of Paris, who closes her eyes and prefers to take refuge in her gilded office at the Hôtel de Ville.
Despite the popular and spontaneous enthusiasm for this campaign which aims to denounce the ugliness of the capital, how do you explain that Anne Hidalgo was elected for a second term in the last municipal elections?
The context of the last municipal elections was very particular. The yellow vests crisis, then the strikes in transport and finally "the Griveaux affair" have completely avoided any possibility of having a serene debate on all the subjects of daily concern of Parisians, without taboos or a priori. Finally, the Covid crisis constituted a formidable bonus for leavers, against a background of record abstention. LREM has a major responsibility in the re-election of Anne Hidalgo: by maintaining themselves at all costs although having neither project nor candidate, they considerably weakened the candidacy of Rachida Dati and thus ruined any hope of alternation. What is terrible is that they have not learned the lessons of their debacle and its ready to reoffend in Île-de-France. Moreover, they say it themselves: they are well aware of having no chance of winning the regional election, but hope to stumble Valérie Pécresse and thus entrust the keys of the Region to the same team which leads today. hui Paris. When I see what the alliance of socialists, communists and environmentalists has done with Paris, I do not want it for the first region of Europe.