On his way, the children ask: “Why is he dressed like that, sir?” » Blue three-piece suit, red neckerchief, a spider-shaped brooch hanging from the lapel of the jacket: Cédric Villani cannot go unnoticed in the alleys of Courdimanche, a popular district of Ulis (Essonne), where he advances, holding his bike in one hand, a pack of leaflets in the other. Three boys sniff out the right customer for their end-of-year raffle. He hands a 5 euro note to one of them. The kid wants to leave. He holds him back. “Hey, now you have to give me back 4 euros, so I’ll have given you 1 euro: 5 minus 4 equals 1.”
Even in the campaign for his re-election, Cédric Villani never hesitates to give a maths lesson. But the political equation of the moment is harder to solve, even for a Fields Medal recipient. Knowing that in the first round of the presidential election, the left-wing candidates gathered 37.3% of the votes, Emmanuel Macron 36.6%, Valérie Pécresse 7.5%, and the far right just over 15% , who will be elected deputy in the 5e Essonne constituency?
Between the offbeat image of Villani, his passage from En Marche! to ecology since his first election, the indeterminate extent of the Mélenchonist wave as well as participation, too many unknowns combine to predict the result. Since 1988, the constituency of Ulis, Gif-sur-Yvette, Bièvres, Orsay and Saclay has alternately sent men from the right and from the left to the Assembly.
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The only certainty, this battle looks very much like a return match between Cédric Villani and the Macronists. In 2017, the star mathematician had been one of the figures of the “Macron generation”, these newcomers elected to the Assembly in the wake of the presidential election. Then the young deputy from Essonne broke with the president, to the point, in 2020, of running for mayor of Paris as a dissident and thus contributing to the fiasco of Benjamin Griveaux then Agnès Buzyn, the two successive representatives of La République en Marche (LRM) in the capital. At the time, the campaign of the two official macronists was led by a certain Paul Midy.
Today, the two men find themselves face to face, but in Essonne. Cédric Villani defends his seat there under a new banner, that of the New Popular Ecological and Social Union (Nupes). As for Paul Midy, who became general manager of LRM, he was sent by the presidential party to win back the constituency.
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