Candidate for the 2017 and 2022 presidential elections, Béarnais Jean Lassalle will lead the Rural Alliance list in the European elections, he announced on Wednesday March 6 in an interview with Ouest-France. The president of the National Hunters’ Federation, Willy Schraen, who was to lead this list, will ultimately be in third position for the vote scheduled for June 9. Wishing to defend “the French art of living”, they will try to repeat the score of the list Hunting, fishing, nature and traditions, by Jean Saint-Josse, which obtained 6.77% of the votes in 1999.
“He will take me into this European battle to defend the rural cause,” explained Mr. Schraen to Ouest-France, saying he believes that the former deputy for Pyrénées-Atlantiques “embodies French cultural identity. He is a humanist, in love with France.
Defending himself to be “anti-European”, Jean Lassalle, 68, says he wants “another Europe, peace, fraternity, economic regulation, taking into account the specificities of each country”. “Everything that is voted on in Brussels and Strasbourg is not intended to be transposed into French law,” asserts Willy Schraen in this interview.
Other names on the Rural Alliance list had already been presented in December, including former rugby player Louis Picamoles; the mayor of Saint-Brès (Hérault), Laurent Jaoul; and the “Queen of Arles”, ambassador of local traditions, Camille Hoteman. Concerning the rest of the list, which must include eighty-one names, “we will have no problem composing it”, assures Mr. Schraen, who slips to count “already around twenty farmers in its ranks”.
Jean Lassalle targeted by a preliminary investigation for rape
Two months after the outbreak of the agricultural crisis in several European countries, Rural Alliance defends, among other things, the establishment of “zero-interest loans for any establishment of new or young farmers,” said Mr. Schraen. Jean Lassalle also says he wants “every French person to be able to live less than forty minutes’ drive from a hospital” and the installation “of new technologies simultaneously in metropolises and rural areas”.
Targeted by a preliminary investigation for rape, for facts which allegedly took place in 2010, Jean Lassalle was questioned by the Bordeaux judicial police in November 2023, Sud-Ouest reported. He is accused by a woman, now aged 45, who had participated in the 2010 regional campaign of Jean Lassalle, who was head of the MoDem list in Aquitaine. The activist accuses him of having raped her in a Bordeaux hotel where she had gone at the invitation of the candidate, thinking of attending a team meeting.
The Béarnais elected official had already been implicated on Twitter in 2017, in the context of testimonies shared with the hashtag
