Whoops ! Samuel Grzybowski completely forgot about his date on Twitch. His friends from the popular primary are waiting for him for a speech on the social network popular with young people, but he is still at the café in front of the local. “Start without me, I’m coming,” warns the 29-year-old activist on the phone. This Sunday, January 23, he should celebrate the 467,000 registered in the initiative he imagined with the environmental activist Mathilde Imer, supposed to designate the sole candidate of the left for the presidential election. We discover him a tad tormented for having made remarks likely to be “instrumentalized against the movement”. “I threw up all night,” earlier this week, the 29-year-old activist told us, who says he receives more than 1,000 insulting messages every day.
A controversy erupted around the reasoning he holds in a video broadcast for his members on November 2. After sipping a beer, the spokesman detailed his strategy to force the leaders of the left to the rally: “Our goal, with the political pole, is to try to prevent the members of the bloc of justices – Anne Hidalgo, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Fabien Roussel, Arnaud Montebourg and Yannick Jadot – can have the 500 signatures [NDLR : s’ils refusent la “primaire populaire]”(..) The last lever is their image in the polls. If we criticize them more and more on social networks, on Twitter, in the media, we can lower their popularity rating.” Since then, the Insoumis like the ecologists accuse him of sabotage and of driving for Christiane Taubira. Samuel Grzybowski claims to have met him only three times, the last two of which on September 25 at the resistant Claude Alphandéry and on November 28 at his own mother’s in Paris. On the merits, the spokesperson assumes this logic of pressure. The association has also almost been called “popular pressure”. He just consents to a mea culpa on the words used: “Of course there is an error in the form. I should have said” temporarily suspend sponsorship until the rally “and not prevent”. Victor Grezes, his best friend and ally in all his fights, met on the benches of the Sorbonne, comes to his aid: “Samuel is the anti-Gabriel Attal. He is very sincere and he does not think about each formula before expressing himself. It can sometimes work against him”.
“We are here for ten years”
The scandal does not seem to have put off supporters. As of January 21, the amount of donations exceeded 919,000 euros. “This week, at one point, we had 4,000 new small donors and 75,000 registered in twelve hours. It’s crazy”, exults Samuel Grzybowski. Who warns, about the citizen movement in the process of hatching, beyond the popular primary: “We are here for ten years.” Contrary to what the first name of the association indicated, named “2022 or never”. A way of responding, too, to MP Aurélien Taché, who appreciates him and recently advised him to assume his commitment to politics. The declaration should flank the buttons to those who despair of the emergence in the debate of this activist in tune with his political generation. “I would have liked to write a book called ‘Waking Generation’. We become aware of exclusions, injustices. (…) Intersectionality is great,” he says. For more than ten years he has approached ministries, pleaded in multipurpose rooms, indignant with the fervor of a monk-soldier before the pope, whom he met twice, the director of the DGSI or Emmanuel Macron’s legal adviser. We discover him in Machiavelli of the union of the left, he was previously a climate activist and association leader. “Militancy is what Samuel likes to do. He goes wherever he can defend his ideas”, confirms Victor Grezes.
In 2009, at age 16, he founded Coexister, an association that celebrates interreligious dialogue. The first big business in the life of this practicing Catholic. “I wanted to create the Red Cross of religions”, unfolds Samuel Grzybowski, whom his detractors have long nicknamed “triple word count”. Adversaries, the activist immediately encounters, given the very particular orientation of his association, which intends to promote peace by giving space to religions, contrary to “ethnocentric universalism” and “secularism” – Samuel Grzybowski likes these two expressions. Behind these concepts, the activist defends the idea of a “systemic racism” which would affect Muslims: “Some of those who attacked me say that the priority fight is the fight against Islamism. I am not I don’t agree. It’s the fight against discrimination.” If he does not ask for the repeal of the laws of 2004 on the prohibition of religious symbols in school and of 2010 on the prohibition of covering his face in public space, he admits having “questioned” about these texts.
Prefect Gilles Clavreul remembers his aplomb when he received him in his office as interministerial delegate for the fight against racism and anti-Semitism, in 2015. “Why do you refuse the term Islamophobia?”, He had asked “after five minutes”, says the senior official, also host of the Republican Spring, who had found him “a boy scout side, inhabited”. Jean-Pierre Mignard, a pillar of “left-wing cathos” networks, describes him as “very proactive, very inflamed”. Coexister is especially criticized for its links with fundamentalist currents of Islam, the financing of a Saudi Arabian think tank or the interventions that Samuel Grzybowski multiplies with organizations sometimes close to the Muslim Brotherhood.
“I knew some signings were going to fuck up”
In January 2015, after the attacks, the president of Coexister initiated the forum “We are united”, in the company of the Collective against Islamophobia in France (CCIF), dissolved in 2020 for its “Islamist propaganda action”, and various activists of this movement. Caroline Fourest accuses him of “accommodations” with the fundamentalists in The world. An unfair trial, according to the activist, as the decision was collegial among the signatories: “We had a meeting at the headquarters of Coexister. There was Jean-Louis Bianco, the president of the Observatory of secularism, Christine Lazerges, the president of the National Consultative Commission on Human Rights, the CFDT, the scouts, other people. I knew that certain signatures were going to fuck the shit up. I ask: “What are we doing?” expressed to keep them, in the name of the national union.”
At that time, Samuel Grzybowski appreciated the leaders of the CCIF whom he described on Twitter, on January 8, 2016, as “brave militants of the anti-racist family”. “He was able to show naivety,” understates Jean-Pierre Mignard. The person concerned does not disagree, highlights his young age, but also pleads for a very broad dialogue: “We must distinguish the leaders of the CCIF and their hundreds of members in the field. Or else we consider that they are All Islamist militants? Me, I think we have to talk to them. Just as we have to make the difference between identity Muslims and conservative Muslims. We have made this difference, for a long time, between identity Catholics and conservative Catholics. ”
Paid 2100 euros per month
In the summer of 2016, he gave in to depression, exhausted by the virulence of online exchanges, and resigned from his post. On occasion, he plunges back into the cauldron of debate, as in November 2020, when he invites Amine El Khatmi, the president of the Republican Spring, to eat a pasta dish to convince him that Coexist has nothing to do with the Muslim brothers.
Even today, Convivencia, the company he founded in the same year 2016, specializing in the religious fact in business, donates all its profits to Coexister. “My salary was 2,500 euros net”, specifies the activist, surprised by the image of bourgeois or start-upper which sticks to his skin, he, the PSG supporter who was subscribed for four years to the Auteuil tribune of the Prince’s Park. In the popular primary, he is paid 2100 euros net. His theory? He would suffer from the “left-wing Catholic” syndrome, considered a traitor by both activists and religious: “I really feel like a mixed race. I’m not at home anywhere.” Samuel Grzybowski is not unaware of the turpitudes of the religious world, from which he claims to have “distanced himself”: he testified at the trial of Archbishop Luigi Ventura, Vatican representative in France until 2019, who told him touched the buttocks. “I didn’t consider myself a victim but it was necessary that the word be released”, he tells us. In order to further blur prejudices, here he is who does not dispute when we tell him of the indiscretions which have been communicated to us on his vote of 2017: he put a Mélenchon ballot in the ballot box in the first round. This will be one less argument for the Unsub. To believe that the trade begins to return.