Sentenced to a four-month suspended prison sentence for having slapped his ex-companion, Adrien Quatennens ruled out resigning from his post as deputy. He explains it.
Adrien Quatennens was therefore sentenced by the courts. After three months of turmoil since the filing of a complaint against him for a slap on his ex-girlfriend was revealed, the LFI deputy from the North received a four-month suspended prison sentence. Set back from his duties as number 2 of the left-wing party, dismissed from the National Assembly, the 32-year-old elected official will no longer be able to sit at the Bourbon Palace for the duration of his reprieve. So decided LFI. While calls for his resignation have multiplied, the one who was expected to take over from Jean-Luc Mélenchon refuses to give up his seat as representative of the 1st district of the North.
“It would set a dangerous precedent”
In an interview given to The voice of the North Tuesday December 13, 2022, Adrien Quatennens closed the door to such an eventuality. “I owe my election first of all to the 65.24% of voters who re-elected me last June. On the ground, in Lille, Faches-Thumesnil, Loos as elsewhere, they show me their impatience to see all this history stop and see me return to the Assembly to honor the mandate they gave me. So that’s what I’m going to do”, he defended himself to the local daily. In his eyes, renouncing his mandate as a deputy because of this affair in which only he and his ex-wife are concerned “would create a dangerous precedent and would open the door to all the political manipulations of private life”.
Adrien Quatennens says he paid his debt by accepting his conviction by the Lille Criminal Court, without appealing, he who had pleaded guilty, never denying the facts with which he was charged, which are unrelated to his mandate. “To the elected officials who want my head, I simply say to them: be careful. Be careful of the treatment you reserve for me for a fault that I have recognized and for which I have accepted to be sanctioned. Because in this Assembly, there is 577 women and men and not “over-women” or “over-men”. There are 577 life stories. Politicians are not perfect and do not have to be. They represent the people. This search for perfection is dangerous. I’m not sure they want us to exhume all the corpses of their private life, “he said in the columns of The voice of the North. He will be able to return to the benches of the National Assembly on April 14, 2023.