Tinder beaten! Tuesday, January 11, with 500,000 downloads in eight days, Elyze, the application that offers you to “match” with one of the presidential candidates, exceeded the scores of its venerable elder. Its co-creator, Grégoire Cazcarra, 22, is quite proud of it. “Elyze circulates in all the headquarters of the political parties”, assures this master student at ESCP, smirk, happy to have laid his stone in the presidential campaign.
Instead of the “profiles” of dating apps, Elyze has a directory of around five hundred cards on which are summarized as many proposals from fifteen candidates, sweeping the entire political landscape. Each sheet is accompanied by a short text summarizing the project; like on Tinder, all you have to do is give a boost to the right if you validate, to the left if you reject, in the center if ultimately the proposal does not inspire you any opinion. At any time, we can stop the parade and visualize, on a podium, the candidates who suit us best. “We have built this tool to reconcile our generation with the presidential election”, explains Grégoire Cazcarra.
Reconnecting first-time voters with the ballot box and, before that, with political life, it has been his priesthood since, as a high school student, he heard, one evening in June 2017, David Pujadas give on France 2 the abstention rate of the under 35 years in legislative elections: 64%. “I was shocked when I heard this figure. “ A vertigo in the face of the abyss of disinterest and lack of confidence of a generation for its elected officials. “With this refrain: what is the point of voting? What good is it to be interested in politics if politicians are not interested in me? “, he reports.
Discussion spaces
Neither one nor two, the literary terminal student in a Bordeaux high school summons his clan to find the parade to this national disinterest. Appointment is given in a café opposite the town hall. There are three of them, therefore Grégoire, and his friends Dorothée and Augustin. They decide to “Build a movement that will give young people a taste for politics” and baptize him The Engaged.
Five years later, the association has around three hundred members, it has developed six branches, in Bordeaux, the mother city of the project, but also in Paris, Lille, Nancy, Toulouse and Rennes. It organizes meetings between young people and elected officials, artists, business leaders, association leaders. “We create spaces for discussion where royalists, communists and macronists dialogue, continues Grégoire Cazcarra. VSThey are also spaces where young people who do not know how to situate themselves on the political scene can ask themselves questions, confront contradiction and learn to understand other points of view. ”
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