A broad smile appears on the face of Pierre Le Mière, 69, when he recalls the visit of Emmanuel Macron to Souillac (Lot), January 18, 2019. He tells how with Nicole, his wife, and several others “yellow vests” of the department they have “Shit a hell of a mess” to disrupt the movement of the Head of State in this city of approximately 3,500 inhabitants. In the midst of the crisis, Emmanuel Macron had come to answer questions from nearly 600 mayors of Occitania and collect the notebooks of grievances filled out by their constituents as part of the great national debate.
“He thought that Macron was going to have lunch in a restaurant in Rocamadour, so we went there. In front, there was Didier Guillaume [le ministre de l’agriculture de l’époque] and lots of men in black. We made noise, we lay on the road and everything”, he recalls, hilarious.
Three years later and less than seventy days before the presidential election, what remains of the democratic exercise launched by Emmanuel Macron? After the passage through Souillac of the President of the Republic, the democratic example had been imitated locally. Between January 15 and March 15, 2019, of the more than 10,000 local meetings, according to the official site of the great debate, around sixty took place in this department of 170,000 people, placing it in the top 3 nationally in number of meetings per inhabitant.
Strong local mobilization
Caroline Mey-Fau, socialist mayor of Miers and vice-president of the department, co-organized three, in Thégra, Bio and Durbans, during the winter of 2019. Meetings which brought together several dozen participants, sometimes more.
Nicole Le Mière was one of them. This 64-year-old retiree, a former civil servant at France Telecom whose pension amounts to around 2,000 euros, was a fervent “yellow vest”. “I told myself that I was going to be able to express myself, even if I didn’t expect anything followingwards”, she recalls, going through her notes taken during the gatherings. “I mainly talked regarding ecology and public services. It no longer concerns us, but the first maternity ward here is more than an hour away by car and the emergency room at thirty. minutes… », laments this grandmother of four grandchildren.
Anette Benmussa met Thégra with more enthusiasm. The sexagenarian, also “yellow vest” and at the time inserted in La France insoumise, had more hopes. “I wanted to see if we might change things”, she recalls, with in particular the wish for a local recycling project, now ” on rails “, thanks to local elected officials. Thierry Chartroux, the unlabeled mayor of Thégra, had organized a public meeting in his town following seeing a banner in the neighboring town of Gramat, where he was registered. “Elect all rotten”. “It hurt me a lot, given the time we give, given the listening we have for others, us, the local elected officials of small villages…”
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