Convicted of domestic violence in December 2022, the rebellious MP intends to return to politics. A return that is not to everyone’s taste.
Absent from the media for months, Adrien Quatennens began a discreet return at the start of the year. The very promising right arm of Jean-Luc Mélenchon was cut down in mid-flight at the end of 2022 by a case of domestic violence: after admitting to having slapped his former partner, he was sentenced to four months in prison. Thursday January 18, the rebellious MP spoke to the press, following his wishes to his Lille constituency (North). “I may have made mistakes in my life, which I regret, I recognized them, I understood, I paid, I worked, I now have the right to continue moving forward,” declared -he.
“It’s not a question of coming back as if nothing had happened,” says Quatennens in the Figaro Friday January 26, while confiding that it took him time to “repair personally”. Following his conviction, the deputy was suspended for four months from the LFI group in the Assembly. His return aroused the anger of many members of the Nupes, to the point that he was definitively excluded from the left-wing intergroup. “As a woman of the left, I was shocked by the management of this extremely serious matter”, testifies an environmentalist deputy in the Figarowho is not happy to hear about the elected representative of the North again.
“We feel that he is preparing”
However, the return of Adrien Quatennens to the forefront is not sudden, affirms one of his colleagues from the presidential majority, who like him sits on the Social Affairs Committee: “After his exclusion, we seen in committee, where he intervenes more and more often, as if nothing had happened. He shows up more and more and we get used to seeing him again. It’s a crescendo return, very calculated, we feel that ‘he prepares himself.”
Quatennens, for his part, affirms that his return is motivated by the political context, in particular the spectacle of the “rise of the extreme right”. The collapse of Nupes and the internal quarrels at La France insoumise also pushed him to react: “I cannot bring myself to see the legacy of the campaign of Jean-Luc Mélenchon trashed”, he declares. It must also be said that none of his colleagues have yet been able to establish themselves as the natural heir of the founder of La France insoumise with a view to 2027. Does Quatennens see that far?