TRUE OR FALSE. Was the multi-convicted activist Cory Le Guen really taken over by the left in Saint-Barthélémy and Saint-Martin?

“Faced with the danger from the extreme right, it was impossible for me not to be on the front and not to face it.” Environmental activist Cory Le Guen, also known for his scams and his multiple convictions, announced Friday June 14 on the social network

“It is with great humility that I will represent the New Popular Front”he affirmed, specifying that this makes “years” that he “work with these two islands where the left had disappeared”. Cory Le Guen also shares a visual of himself smiling against a pink background. “We will be behind you”, “Very happy for you my friend, you better win this round”react Internet users.

Very quickly, the announcement of this candidacy raised eyebrows. “Checked, this is false information. This multiple convicted individual is not invested by the Popular Front. He is just self-invested in his own head”reveals journalist Mathilde Lemaire, who followed his legal journey, on the social network : “He was not invested by the Ecologists. (…) He has no particular mandate to represent the Popular Front.”

A few hours later, Cory Le Guen backtracked. In a new message, he denounces “a burst of pressure” of the national leadership of the party and ensures that it has been invested by the regional office of Caraïbe Ecologie Les Verts Guadeloupe. To support his remarks, he shares a screenshot of an email signed by the regional secretary for Guadeloupe, addressed to Marine Tondelier, the boss of the Ecologists.

For the activist, “everything was in order” in the investiture process. “The reason the party seems to be turning around is purely because of a lack of political courage.”estimates Cory Le Guen on X. “The bourgeois bloc of EELV management has therefore once again won to the detriment of a candidacy coming from below”he also criticized franceinfo.

“With this change of heart, I am forced to step down with great anger and disappointment.”

Cory Le Guen, environmental activist

at franceinfo

Contacted by franceinfo, the management of the Ecologists denies having any knowledge of this investiture, which seems to have gone under the radar: “We didn’t know about it. We spent four days discussing a constituency agreement and a programmatic agreement [dans le cadre du Nouveau Front populaire]she justifies. THE overseas departments and regions are outside the scope. We obviously did not take the time, in the emergency, to follow up on what was outside of this emergency.”

“The national office had no say since, apart from agreement, the regions are sovereign to nominate their left-wing candidate”, assured the activist for his part. Concretely, Cory Le Guen could be the candidate of the Ecologists in Saint-Barthélémy and Saint-Martin, but could not claim to be part of the New Popular Front.

In fact, this coalition is not effective in the overseas territories. Excluding these territories from the agreements is not new: when the left-wing parties united to form Nupes for the 2022 legislative elections, the overseas departments and regions and Corsica were not included.

Contacted by franceinfo, the regional office of Caraïbe Ecologie Les Verts Guadeloupe confirmed that it was within its responsibility to present a candidate in the constituency of Saint-Barthélémy and Saint-Martin, but only under the environmentalist banner. He specifies that the nomination process was still in progress when Cory Le Guen declared himself a candidate, without wishing to comment further.

This is not the first time that Cory Le Guen has been noticed. Member for a year of Europe Ecologie-Les Verts (since renamed Les Ecologistes), he became known in trapping far-right activist Damien Rieu with a fake prayer video at the Paris judicial court. The founder of Génération Identitaire, used to relaying this type of content, with the aim of denouncing a rise in Islam in France, was quick to share it without verifying it.

This rapid notoriety earned him the attention of the fascist sphere, which delved into his past. Fraud, usurpation, deception… Cory Le Guen is well known to the justice system. He has been convicted 18 times and was also the subject of an Interpol Red Notice, a request sent to police agencies around the world for his arrest.

In 2018, for example, he posed as Brigitte Macron’s nephew in order to benefit from a VIP welcome in a luxury hotel and seats for a Formula 1 Grand Prix. On the occasion of this affair, for which Cory Le Guen received a year in prison, a psychological expertise described him as “pathological liar” having a “compulsive tendency to confabulate”. Cory Le Guen assured the site LesJours.fr that his life as a crook was behind him.