Candidate of the united left (excluding LFI) for the 2026 Paris municipal elections, on March 15 and 22, Emmanuel Grégoire tells têtu· his program regarding LGBT issues. The socialist rules out a possible alliance with Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s movement.
Photographie : Audoin Deforges pour têtu·
He does not belong to the “club of homosexuals” that this week has dominated Parisian political headlines, but he intends to defeat Rachida Dati in the capital’s municipal elections. Emmanuel Grégoire, a longtime ally of the LGBT community, is the head of the united left list that brings together socialists, communists, environmentalists, and even the movement of Raphaël Glucksmann. The 48-year-old socialist, former first deputy (2018-2024) of the current mayor, Anne Hidalgo, claims a positive record for the municipality on LGBTQI+ issues and promises to accelerate the pace.
- Your zemmourist rival, Sarah Knafo, ignores the price of a Navigo pass subscription; do you know the price of a pint at Cox, in the Marais?
Emmanuel Grégoire: I went there recently, but this time they offered me my beer. I would say 7 or 8 euros [reply: 7.50 euros, ed.].
- Many LGBT venues report financial difficulties and problems with the police. How do you plan to prevent them from continuing to disappear?
These venues are indispensable to Paris. As with all nightlife venues, we must face contradictory injunctions: total support for partying and, at times, residents’ dissatisfaction. The other threat is real estate prices: we have intervened on several occasions, for example to save Tango. I am proud of our action for this symbolically important venue. We will need, through land-use actions, to strengthen the City’s support for the Marais, which offers a form of community safety. But we can also note that LGBT venues are spreading across Paris. We will establish in every arrondissement an LGBT+ referent whom venues can contact so that the administration intervenes quickly.
- Will you support, in the same way, the LGBT associations sector, often financially struggling?
“The Paris LGBT Archives Center will open in the first half of 2027.”
Associations are financially struggling due to the inflation of needs on one hand, and on the other a withdrawal of institutions such as the Île-de-France region, unhappy with last year’s Inter LGBT Pride poster. We cannot claim both freedom of association and restrictive political control. I am on the side of freedom, including when associations are not lenient. I announce that we will double the municipal subsidies to LGBTQI+ associations, which will go from about 380,000 euros currently to 760,000 euros.
- The project of the LGBT Archives Center is advancing at a senator’s pace. What didn’t work for the project you launched in 2019 not yet to materialize?
Good news, the Paris LGBT Archives Center will open in the first half of 2027! Jean-Luc Romero-Michel [the current deputy in charge of anti-discrimination, who now carries the file, ed.] has done a lot to support the project’s steering group. These are people who cultivate an independence from institutions; after some misunderstandings, we have found our working basis. We now have a 600 m2 space, and 300,000 euros in subsidies to renovate the premises. The task now is to stabilize the operating funding for this archival center. We have committed 100,000 euros, and we will ramp up to reach an annual budget around 200,000 euros.
- Paris is positioning itself as a global model in the fight against HIV. How can it also become a model in reducing risk related to chemsex?
Our priority is simple: saving lives. Paris was the first city in France to adopt a specific plan in 2021. We will embark on a new stage for the next three years, more ambitious and better coordinated. I want to better articulate prevention, risk reduction, mental health, emergency services, the police, and health professionals, notably around health mediation. Chemsex is not only a question of drugs but concerns public health, mental health, isolation, social vulnerability… We must act at all levels, without stigma, to guarantee rapid and non-judgmental access to care. On this subject as on others, we will always choose sanitary effectiveness and the protection of people.
“Regarding drug use, I am convinced of the profound inefficacy of the prohibition system and the effectiveness of prevention.”
- What assessment do you make of safer consumption rooms, also called addiction care stops?
All reports state that it is not a miracle solution but essential in our risk-reduction toolkit. I want to denounce the demagogic posture of Rachida Dati, who denounces them by blaming the city, while these are not municipal structures. These facilities depend on the State, which in its budget decided to extend the experiment. If the State wanted to create more in Paris, I would support it because they help reduce risks and stabilize the consumption of illegal substances. I also want to pay tribute to the social workers who do essential work. We must support them, and not stigmatize them as the right does.
- Are you in favor, as Senator Anne Souyris, former Deputy Mayor for Health, of decriminalizing drug use?
Regarding drug use, I am convinced of the profound ineffectiveness of the prohibition system and of the effectiveness of prevention. Given its incompetence in the fight against drug trafficking and consumption levels, the State should let scientists speak and organize a calm debate on the subject, far from caricatures.
- Can the Mayor of Paris help to combat homophobic ambushes?
Everyone’s safety is a shared imperative. On this issue, I want to convene and work with dating platforms, where most of the physical assaults occur. I would like platforms and associations to find ways to prevent this risk. Then, we must support all legal actions. We still have difficulty quantifying the extraordinary violence of these assaults, with indicators that do not fully reflect the severity of a number of assaults, treated on the same footing as other phenomena that have nothing to do with it. The fight against street assaults will be one of the missions of the night brigades of the municipal police, with increased presence around festive venues, where we must also work on street lighting to limit anxiety-inducing areas.
- You were the first signatory of an op-ed supported by têtu· in which political leaders commit to facilitating civil status changes for transgender people. Will this be an advance in the first 100 days of your term?
I cannot commit to having the change completed within 100 days, but I will take it up at the start of my term so that it happens as quickly as possible. I rely on the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). The Minister of the Interior should take note, so that the facilitation of changing civil status is possible without legislative modification. It is a symbol of our goodwill towards diversity. In all countries where the far-right wave arrives, rights are always attacked first against the most marginalized minorities.
- The Paris Green councillor Alice Coffin publicly expressed dissatisfaction at not being on your list. Why isn’t she on it?
I have a lot of sympathy for Alice Coffin, who is elected in the same district as me. For months, she had expressed a wish not to be a candidate. When we merged our lists with the ecologists, she had requested to be included with them, but too late. But our list is composed of many feminist figures, a struggle that we carry collectively.
- Alice Coffin thinks it is her activist profile that unsettles people…
We have always had activists on our lists, who contribute a lot. We are part of a collective that is not merely a sum of individuals. I regret how this happened because if she had indicated sooner her intention to stand again, she could have been on it.
- Paris regularly serves as a showcase for the difficulties in welcoming migrants. How can the situation be improved?
Hundreds of thousands of people must be regularized, out of humanity and pragmatism. We must denounce the lie about the so-called great replacement. I am in favor of massive regularization because these migrants are already here, they want to work, and for demographic reasons our unbalanced social model will collapse. Immigration structurally contributes to the functioning of our large cities, and in particular Paris.
“The elected members of La France insoumise nurture a populism that no longer relies on an economic balance of power, but on a confrontation within the community.”
- Stone by the death, on February 14 in Lyon, of Quentin Deranque, a identitarian activist, La France insoumise denounces a “demonization.” Do you see this as a form of responsibility for the causes of this violence?
A surge of violence of this nature pulls its perpetrators out of the republican arc. Nothing justifies such violence. In public debate, we are witnessing a rising tension of instrumentalized confrontation, and this climate deeply worries me. Politicians have enormous responsibility, by their words and by their actions! Making outrage a method is the opposite of the way I conceive politics. This climate, with its provocations and its Trumpist methods, is also fed by Rachida Dati.
- What about the party of Jean-Luc Mélenchon?
When Jean-Luc Mélenchon writes a piece about me calling me “infamous,” I consider that we are moving away from the realm of healthy political confrontation. Likewise for Sophia Chikirou, LFI’s candidate in Paris for the municipal elections, with her regularly outrageous remarks. By continually theorizing perpetual conflict, war follows. I am very uncomfortable with this rhetorical register and, perhaps, ideological.
- Can the Left union still understand La France insoumise?
I share the aspiration for unity among a large portion of the left-leaning people. But the communautarian reading and the methods of La France insoumise’s elected representatives are unbearable to me, and make union with them impossible. The populism they nurture is a reinvented form of class struggle that no longer relies on an economic balance of power, but on a community confrontation. It is a huge danger. I will always fight it, because it is the opposite of my convictions and my values.
