COQUEREL. A police officer filed a complaint against the deputy LFI Eric Coquerel for violence this Monday, March 20. He accuses him of having punched him on the sidelines of a strike…
Eric Coquerel again in turmoil? According to a journalist from BFMTV, the deputy LFI, president of the Finance Committee of the National Assembly, is under the influence of a complaint from a police officer for “violence on a person holding public authority”. The policeman accuses the elected official of having hit him in the face “with the back of his closed fist”, and with “the help of his knuckles”, this Monday morning, on the Véolia site in Saint-Denis (93) . The police were mobilized to unblock a garbage truck depot, while Eric Coquerel was on hand to support the strikers, indicates Mélanie Bertrand on her Twitter account.
Eric Coquerel would have touched the left cheekbone of the agent whose ITT would be less than 8 days. The deputy of Nupes would have defended himself from any desire to strike, believing that he was going to “fall”. Asked by the news channel, Eric Coquerel’s entourage believes that “the facts are exaggerated”. According to our information, a police officer has filed a complaint against the deputy LFI Éric
This is not the first complaint against Eric Coquerel. The LFI deputy was the subject of a complaint for “sexual harassment” last summer, barely appointed to head the Finance Committee. Figure of La France insoumise, Eric Coquerel had been accused on July 4, 2022 by Sophie Tissier, at the police station in Vanves (Hauts-de-Seine), south of Paris. An action following a first report made to LFI’s sexual violence monitoring committee which provoked numerous calls for resignation.
The investigation opened for “sexual assault and harassment” had been dismissed at the end of February, indicated AFP citing a source familiar with the matter. Sophie Tissier denounced an attitude that Éric Coquerel would have had against her, during a party in 2014, evoking a “stalker with sticky wandering hands” and “inappropriate attacks in 2014”.
As of Thursday June 30, 2022, Éric Coquerel, freshly elected president of the Finance Committee of the National Assembly, had been the subject of accusations of sexual violence on RTL, professed by the activist Rokhaya Diallo, columnist and activist, founder of the anti-racist association Les Indivisibles.
On June 30 on RTL, the activist had relayed on the air statements directly implicating the elected official because of his behavior with women. “I have several sources within LFI, and I have heard several times, women talking about the behavior he (Éric Coquerel, ND) would have with women. These are things that have come up repeatedly for several years. . I am aware that these are accusations. […] I have been hearing things for a long time. Internally, at LFI, I have several women who have told me about them”, had- she stated.
Explicitly implicated, Eric Coquerel had finally reacted in a column in the Journal du Dimanche, published on Sunday July 3, just before the filing of the complaint. “How to react to a rumor that is not based on any complaint, no report to the internal unit of LFI, despite frequent calls and press releases from LFI to be able to do so, no public testimony, no results of serious journalistic investigation in addition five years?”, he had pointed out in particular.
The deputy for Seine-Saint-Denis had claimed never to have “exerted physical or psychological violence or coercion to obtain a report” and, above all, not to have had “criminal behavior in the field of sexist and sexual violence”.
With 21 votes collected, the LFI deputy obtained the head of the coveted Finance Committee of the Palais-Bourbon hemicycle, Thursday, June 30, 2022. In a decisive third round by relative majority, he beat the candidate of the RN, Jean-Philippe Tanguy, who for his part only obtained 11 votes, as well as the LR Véronique Louwagie, who collected 9. He now heads this commission with a very strategic role of examining budgets before their arrival to the Meeting, and may personally have access to information covered by tax secrecy. A major position won therefore… But after long negotiations. It took three adjournments and three ballots for the deputies to decide between the three candidates from the opposition.
In fact, since 2007, only a deputy who does not belong to the majority can accomplish this mission of control, as specified in article 39 of the rules of the Assembly: “cannot be elected to the presidency of the commission of Finance, general economy and budgetary control than a deputy belonging to a group that has declared itself to be in opposition”. Thanks to this position, Éric Coquerel will have access, for one year (duration of this mandate), to documents covered by tax secrecy, and will hold the last word on each decision and each modification: he will have to decide on the investigations of the rapporteurs of the commission investigating the financing of public expenditure. He will also be able to reject the amendments made to the various bills: for that, he will only have to prove that their financing poses a problem.
Other criticisms, this time of a political nature, target Éric Coquerel. They were born on the right of the political spectrum, where Republican executives were worried about the candidacy of the Insoumis in recent weeks, believing that he risked using strategically the information covered by the tax secrecy to which his position gives him access. Several personalities are skeptical about this choice, worrying about the abusive use of this budgetary control body. Gilles Carrez in particular, ex-MP LR, himself chairman of this commission from 2012 to 2017, declared on franceinfo on June 30: “I don’t especially want to impugn Éric Coquerel’s intentions but I have heard some of his declarations in the media, implying that he found it completely normal that such and such a tax file of large companies be put in the public square”.
The ex-LR and now macronist Éric Woerth also showed concern about the profile of the Insoumis: in an interview with Le Figaro on June 21, he declared: “the Insoumis obviously have in mind to control tax”, judging that their appointment would be “as if judges on the law commission made judgments”. He also made a point of recalling that the role of this body was to “control the action of the government and public policies, not to take an interest in the files of each other”. In the same way, Olivier Marleix, new boss of the LR group, confided on June 22 to the newspaper Les Echos that he would have preferred that the left-wing coalition choose a candidate with a “more consensual profile” like the socialist Valérie Rabault, who was General Rapporteur of the Budget during the mandate of François Hollande. For his part, Éric Coquerel assured the microphone of Sud Radio on June 24 that he did not imagine “using the presidency of the Finance Committee to organize a tax witch hunt”, but to “better fight the ‘tax avoidance at Mc Donald’s’.
Éric Coquerel took his first steps in politics at the age of 14, taking part in demonstrations against the Debré law. First claiming to be anarchist, he joined the Revolutionary Communist League in 1983. A graduate of the University of Paris-Diderot, he landed a job as a communicator, before getting more involved in politics by changing his sensitivity. ideological: in 1998, he left the Revolutionary Communist League which had become closer to the Lutte Ouvrière party. He then opted for the Republican and Citizen Movement in 2003 – whose line is so-called left-wing Gaullism and moderate protectionism – and very quickly became an important member (he was one of the four national secretaries). But his political aspiration differs a little from this movement and, in June of the same year, he leaves it to found his own: the Movement for a Republican and Social Alternative. In 2007, he founded, with other personalities from the French left such as Clémentine Autain and Marc Dolez, the Now Left club, which advocates a gathering of the anti-liberal left.
His political commitment intensified when, in 2008, he took full part in the founding of the Left Party, whose orientation was socialist, ecologist and republican. It was launched by Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Marc Dolez after their departure from the Socialist Party. Éric Coquerel becomes the national secretary for external and unitary relations. He measured himself at the polls for the first time in 2010, when he was elected regional councilor for Ile-de-France under the leadership of the Left Front and alternatives. Close to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, he was his “special adviser” during the presidential campaign of 2012. Militant at that time for social causes, such as the fight against the evacuations of illegal immigrants, he became coordinator of the general secretariat of the Left Party in 2015. When Jean-Luc Mélenchon founded La France insoumise in 2016, Éric Coquerel decided to wear the colors of the new party in the legislative elections.
Éric Coquerel embarked on the race for the legislature in 2017. He then competed for the deputation in the 1st constituency of Seine-Saint-Denis: he won in the second round with 51.72% of the votes against LREM Sébastien Ménard who nevertheless left favorite. A very active member of Parliament, he is, after six months, in second position in the ranking of the attendance and activity of members established by Capital. In fact, between October 2018 and July 2019, he will have tabled 11 legislative proposals: Mediapart reveals at this time that he was the 6th most active deputy in the entire hemicycle during this period. The standout positions and initiatives of his mandate were the co-signature of a bill relating to euthanasia and assisted suicide for a dignified end of life, a co-signature calling for the banning of glyphosate in January 2019, another on the generalization of the teaching of issues related to the preservation of biological diversity and climate change within the framework of planetary limits in October 2019. More recently, he was the author of a bill relating to the legalization of the production, sale and consumption of cannabis under state control in January 2022.
Éric Coquerel represented himself in Seine-Saint-Denis for the legislative elections of 2022, this time under the banner of Nupes, the intergroup which brings together left-wing parties. Collecting more than 50% of the votes in the first round, he obtained one of the best national scores of his party. Also active in committees related to finance and budgetary control, since he was a member of the standing committee on “Finance, general economy and budgetary control”, member of the parliamentary information mission relating to the implementation of the organic law on finance laws and member of the parliamentary mission of evaluation and control of the finance commission, he embarked on this new mandate with, among other things, the objective of running for the post of the presidency of the finance committee. He was elected on June 30, 2022.
