Even if the prosecution had asked for her release, Valérie Damaseau preferred to wait for the court's decision to announce that she was embarking on the electoral race. The day after the judgment which definitively put her out of the question, she went to the prefecture to file her Alternative list and organized a first meeting in Quartier d'Orléans, "her native district".
First vice-president of the COM, Valérie Damaseau wished to leave Team Gibbs. “Why didn't I do it sooner? Because I had a five-year contract with the population and I wanted to fulfill it to the end,” she confides. Then, she mentions “difficulties with the leader” to justify her choice. She accuses him of a lack of communication, of (political) exchanges with the group that the members of the list had formed in 2017. A finding also shared by Alex Pierre and Jean-Raymond Benjamin who also left the Union for Democracy to join Alternative. “I am an athlete and I play as a team,” insists Valérie Damaseau, who has been playing volleyball for years.
However, the first vice president assures that she does not want to campaign against the president but “for the territory”. In recent weeks, the other candidates approached her but she told them no. "They came to me to campaign against someone or I want to campaign for the territory," she said. "Yawo Nyuiadzi also offered me to come with him, but he has plans and has surrounded himself with people who don't suit me," she adds. And to let it be understood that she will not make an alliance in the event of a second round. "Politics is not a game", she says, pointing out that the candidates who had made an alliance in the second round in 2017 "were not able, once elected, to form a group" within of the territorial council to have the tools (office, etc.) that could have been made available to them.
"There is no political calculation, on the contrary there is a real desire to present new ideas", she declared in Quartier d'Orléans.
“I am not here to talk about negative things, we are not here to say that we are against it, we come to defend our principles, our projects to innovate, preserve and transmit”, assures Valérie Damaseau.
“We need a long-term social project and not a term program, the crises linked to Irma and covid have shown this. We want to set up projects by district. We must value what already exists before wanting to build something new,” she agrees.
The Alternative list will present its program next week.
List members:
Valérie Damaseau, Alex Pierre, Audrey Gil, Jean-Raymond Benjamin, Bernadette Venthou-Dumaine, Ken Seymour, Peggy Oulerich, Thierry Berte, Josiane Davoren, Michaël Moutou, Bahia Yacine, Claude Jeffers, Héléna Clarisse/Desir, Ashille Brooks, Murielle Fournier , David Pivetta, Rosanna Castillo, Alvarado Burnett, Perrette Dorce, Joseph Carti, Micheline Saint-Germain/Voltaire, Shermon Maccow, Malika Hughes, Mittler Louissant, Joane Felissaint, Kareem Brooks.
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