Jean Lassalle
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Jean Lassalle (born May 3, 1955 in Lourdios-Ichère , Basses-Pyrénées ) is a French politician (Résistons !, formerly UDF , MoDem ). He has been a member of the National Assembly for the Pyrénées-Atlantiques department since 2002 and was a candidate in the 2017 presidential election . He has also been the mayor of his home parish since 1977.
Life
Lassalle is the son of a shepherd who worked in transhumance on the slopes of the Vallée d'Aspe . This family tradition is still carried on today by his brother, Lassalle himself is a farm machine technician and runs a company with ten employees. His son Thibault Lassalle (* 1987) is a rugby union player. From 1989 to 1999 he was President of the Pyrenees National Park .
In 1977 he became mayor of his home village Lourdios-Ichère and at the age of 21 was one of the youngest mayors in France. Lassalle has held this office continuously since then. He later became a member of the General Council ( conseil général ) of Pyrénées-Atlantiques and deputy to the Conservative MP Michel Inchauspé . In 2002 he was elected for the first time for the Union pour la démocratie française as representative of the 4th constituency of Pyrénées-Atlantiques in the National Assembly. Lassalle was re-elected in 2007 and when the party split, he joined the Mouvement démocrate of his friend François Bayrou , and in 2012 he was re-elected.
As a member of parliament, Lassalle caused a stir several times with unusual forms of action: In June 2003, he interrupted a speech by then Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy by singing a folk song in Béarnais , the dialect of his home country, to protest against the closure of a police station in his constituency. In March 2006, he went on a hunger strike for six weeks to protest the closure of a factory in his constituency . In 2013 he wandered through France for eight months to personally experience the effects of the economic crisis on the country and to hear the worries and needs of the “forgotten”, in the small villages and in the ten most notorious social hot spots in the big cities. In recent years Lassalle has come out with positions critical of capitalism that are unusual for his party , for example he supported the protest against the loi travail and the youth movement Nuit debout in spring 2016. He then extended this tour to 12 European countries and met Angela Merkel , among others . During a visit to Syria, he shook hands with Bashar al-Assad , for which he was heavily criticized by politicians from various parties.
In autumn 2016, Lassalle announced that he would run for the 2017 presidential election. For his presidential candidacy he resigned from the MoDem, whose chairman Bayrou supported the candidacy of Emmanuel Macron , and founded his own movement called Resistons! In the name of his movement he announced "resistance" to the rule of finance capital. His program, which he outlined in his book entitled Un berger à l'Elysée (“A Shepherd in the Elysée Palace ”), is primarily tailored to the problems of rural France. He called, for example, to re-establish democracy at the local level and to better protect the environment, but did not ignore the problems of the banlieue . He campaigned for the withdrawal of all French troops from war missions and for a reduction in redundant bureaucracy. His campaign received a lot of media attention, with Lassalle being perceived as a very atypical politician because of his village origins and his strong dialect. The American television comedian John Oliver mentioned him and his unusual election commercial in the aftermath of his Last Week Tonight program on the French presidential election.
Lassalle received 1.21 percent of the votes in the first ballot on April 23, 2017 and thus reached rank 7 out of 11 candidates. In his home department Pyrénées-Atlantiques he received 7.6 percent of the vote (6th place), in his home village and some surrounding communities he was in first place.
See also: List of members of the National Assembly of the 15th electoral term (France) , List of members of the National Assembly of the 14th electoral term (France) , List of members of the National Assembly of the 13th electoral term (France) and List of members of the National Assembly of the 12th electoral term (France) . Parliamentary term (France)
Individual evidence
- ^ Jean Lassalle in the Assemblée nationale database
Web links
- Official website (French)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Lassalle, Jean |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French politician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 3, 1955 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Lourdios-Ichère |