Rebel and environmentalist deputies camped with homeless families and Housing Rights activists in the 7th arrondissement of Paris on Tuesday evening.
“Tomorrow, I’ll sleep on the street!” Announced the deputy of La France insoumise William Martinet, Monday January 15, on his account Since December, around thirty homeless or poorly housed families have camped there, supervised by activists from the Droit au Logement association. Left-wing elected officials spent the night in tents to sound the alarm.
“A few hundred meters from here, Solférino metro station, the Droit au Logement association is camped at the foot of an empty Haussmann building,” declared William Martinet on Tuesday in the Assembly, in the middle of a question session with the government. “To all those of good will, I say meet Solférino metro station for the right to housing!” The Yvelines deputy demanded, among other emergency measures, the requisition of empty housing.
Several deputies responded to the call, starting with the president of the rebellious deputies, Mathilde Panot, as well as the rebellious vice-president of the National Assembly, Caroline Fiat. It was therefore from the Solférino camp that they followed Emmanuel Macron’s press conference.
Environmentalist deputies joined their rebellious colleagues: “Emmanuel Macron, we will listen to your words from the homeless camp, in Solférino where we will sleep”, indicated Sandrine Rousseau in the evening on X. “It will be cold. We hope that you will understand the urgency of acting on housing and that you will not only have indifference.” The environmentalist deputy for Lyon Marie-Charlotte Garin was also present, as was the deputy for Rhône Hubert Julien-Laferrière.
In the morning, the rebellious William Martinet took stock of his experience, in a video published on was very well equipped,” he testified. “And anyway, what made me have a bad night was that I went to sleep very angry,” he continued, saying he was “absolutely indignant to see” that Emmanuel Macron had not “uttered a single word for homeless people, not a single word for people dead in the street.”
Last week, three homeless people were found frozen to death in the country. La France insoumise has taken the matter to the Court of Justice of the Republic against the government “for failure to assist a person in danger and endangering the lives of others”, said Mathilde Panot on January 11.