Editing Alain Lipietz (section)

==Political activities==

Alain Lipietz is a former [[Maoist]]. He was then a candidate of [[Europe Écologie–The Greens|Les Verts]] for the legislative elections of 1986 in [[Seine-Saint-Denis]], and became the national spokesperson of the French Green Party in 1997.

He was an elected representative of the [[The Greens (France)|Green Party]] at the European Parliament from 1999 to 2009, serving two terms.

Alain Lipietz was an adviser to the ''Commission économique des Verts'', a member of the ''Commission française du développement durable'' (from 2000) and a member of the ''Conseil d'établissement du Collège de France'' (since 2001).

On 21 June 2001, Lipietz was elected as candidate for the French Green Party in the [[2002 French presidential election|2002 presidential elections]]. With 50% of the votes cast in the party's primaries, Lipietz narrowly beat rival candidate [[Noël Mamère]].

However, controversy arose during the summer of 2001, when Lipietz seemed to have appeared sympathetic to separatists jailed for planting bombs in [[Corsica]]. A second controversy was his opposition to reopening the [[Mont Blanc]] Tunnel between France and Italy, which had been closed in 1999 after 39 people died in a fire. Meanwhile, the party dropped from seven to five percent support in opinion polls. Finally, on 14 October 2001, [[The Greens (France)|Les Verts]] managed to survive a major internal crisis and changed their Presidential candidate, dropping Alain Lipietz to choose Noël Mamère, who had supposedly made the irrevocable decision not to run just a day sooner.