Asking regarding the state of mind of left-wing mayors three months before the presidential election, asking them who their sponsorship will go to, is sometimes exposing oneself to polite refusals to speak: “The mayor does not wish to comment on this news for the moment. » It is to collect, more often, regrets as for the state of the left and, sometimes, tenuous hopes. One thing is certain, faced with the multitude of candidates on the left, some elected officials give their sponsorship to that of their political family. Or not at all.
At the end of last year, two declarations launched, with great fanfare, a call for the unity of the left. The first is the oath of Romainville, on the initiative of the mayor, François Dechy, who arrived at the head of this city of Seine-Saint-Denis in 2020 with a list of union of the left. “We swear to grant our sponsorships only when the conditions for the gathering have been met”, proclaimed, on October 16, 2021, these few hundred elected officials. Then, on December 18, 2021, some 1,500 reinforcements, many socialists, published a tribune in Sunday newspaper, to request the organization of a primary.
Since then, the popular Primary that these elected officials wanted has been reduced to a simple investiture. Among the four main candidates selected – with Yannick Jadot, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Anne Hidalgo – Christiane Taubira is the only one to have announced that she will recognize the result. At the risk of alienating part of the socialist apparatus and elected officials, Anne Hidalgo, following being favorable to it, excluded it. “This primary will not take place. (…) If the citizen’s primary leads to an additional candidacy, we are no longer at all in the original idea, “ she said, Thursday, January 13, during the presentation of her program.
“How do we find ourselves there? »
A conclusion that goes wrong in the ranks of elected socialists. Benoît Payan, the socialist mayor of Marseille, distanced himself from the candidate, the same day, in a interview at Release. “You can’t say, ‘I’m going to primary school’ on Monday, and on Thursday, ‘I’m not going’. (…), he says. I will support whoever wins the primary. » He is not the only socialist mayor to express doubts. Behind the scenes or openly, several elected officials from small and large cities regret the confusion instilled by these reversals.
In a small town of 900 souls in Finistère, Gourlizon, Emmanuelle Rasseneur, signatory of the December appeal, is one of those city councilors who are struggling to follow the successive regarding-faces. “I am very disappointed to see that Anne Hidalgo is dissociating herself from the primary, I had supported the call of the mayors of Brittany [dans une tribune publiée en ligne le 5 octobre 2021] for her to be the candidate of the Socialist Party…” While noting that the initiative is falling back, the mayor “don’t change your mind”: “I will give my sponsorship to the person who comes out of the popular Primary,” she warns.
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