Valérie Pécresse sends an invoice for 100,000 euros to the LFI mayor of Saint-Denis after damage

Those who consider violence sometimes “legitimate” can legitimately be asked to assume the financial consequences. It is with this conviction that the president of the Île-de-France region, Valérie Pécresse, intends to send, in a rare gesture, an invoice for 100,000 euros to the LFI mayor of Saint-Denis, Bally Bagayoko. This sum will cover the “replacement of the gate of the Paul-Éluard high school (in Saint-Denis, Editor’s note), the costs of guarding and cleaning the site”, specifies the president LR in a publication on X, published Tuesday evening. And scathing: “The French no longer want to pay taxes to repair what thugs, white-hot by LFI “which judges violence legitimate”, have trashed!”

Tuesday, Bally Bagayoko, who went to the gates of the Paul-Éluard high school at the start of the day, at the dawn of a new day of protest and blockade of high schools, judged on BFMTV that “violence, at a given moment, can be legitimate”. “Whenever we can avoid it, it’s better,” he immediately took care to add. A nuance which was obviously not taken into account by the students of the Paul-Éluard high school, who tore off part of the establishment's gate, after shaking it. “Let the mayor assume his responsibility. I took on mine: a complete renovation of the high school (Paul-Éluard, Editor's note) of 45 million euros in progress!”, exclaims Valérie Pécresse in her message.

The president of the region put the cost of damage and ransacking in Ile-de-France high schools at “nearly a million euros” on Tuesday since the start of the protest movement on Monday, September 21. The damaged gates “will require heavy work, security costs to prevent intrusions and thefts, not to mention fire damage, tags, broken windows and cleaning costs to be incurred,” she added in a press release published at the end of the day.

Legally, it is the Île-de-France region, and not the town halls, which is responsible for the construction, maintenance, renovation and operation of Ile-de-France high schools. This transfer of invoices therefore has more of a political dimension than an accounting one. This gesture was obviously not to the taste of the LFI deputy for Essonne, Antoine Léaument, who saw fit to react to Valérie Pécresse's publication by asking for additional funding for his constituency: “Hello Valérie Pécresse, I am this morning at the Léonard de Vinci high school in my constituency. Can you please repair the loudspeakers that provide student information in an emergency? It's dangerous. Thank you in advance!”, he published on X on Wednesday morning.

For his part, Bally Bagayoko, who we saw, on videos that went around the web on Tuesday, singing La Marseillaise in the middle of a crowd of young demonstrators, contests any “political recovery” of the high school movement. “Bally Bagayoko is criticized for being acclaimed by high school students!”, quipped the coordinator of La France insoumise, Manuel Bompard, at the microphone of France Inter.