Bordeaux (AFP)

The senator and former socialist president of the General Council of Gironde, Philippe Madrelle, died Tuesday at the age of 82 in Bordeaux, we learned from the county council.

This former heavyweight politician in the South West spent 35 years as president of the General Council of Gironde, from 1976 to 2015, with three years of interruption from 1985 to 1988.

Philippe Madrelle was still a senator. He had been elected for the first time in 1980 and has been re-elected ever since.

"Philippe Madrelle, a zealous decentralizer, has largely contributed to the evolution of the Girondin and Aquitaine political landscape until then mostly anchored on the right," the departmental council wrote in a statement, describing the elected representative as "a strong defender of the small communes, the Département. and the right balance between rural and urban areas ".

The political reactions multiplied Tuesday night with the announcement of the death of Philippe Madrelle. "The Republic loses today a great elected," said Francois Hollande on Twitter, greeting a senator who "did honor to socialism."

"By force we ended up believing that neither defeat nor death had any hold on you," wrote on his side the first secretary of PS Olivier Faure, while the chairman of the PS group in the Senate, Patrick Kanner, hailed "the memory of a human elected, committed tirelessly and to the end for the Gironde for more than 50 years".

"An anchorage out of the ordinary, a fidelity to a territory, a longevity difficult to imagine today ...", Abundant Manuel Valls, saying that "his experience will be missed".

Born in Saint-Seurin-of-Cursac (Gironde), Philippe Madrelle was engaged very young to the socialist party.

Professor of English, he was elected for a first term as a city councilor in 1965 in Ambarès-et-Lagrave, near Bordeaux, and at the same time became substitute for the deputy of the fourth district of the Gironde, René Cassagne.

Elected general councilor of Carbon-Blanc in the north-eastern suburbs of Bordeaux in 1969 then city councilor of the city, he became the mayor in 1976, as well as president of the departmental council of the Gironde, then the youngest in France.

Mr. Madrelle had been deputy for Gironde for twelve years, from 1968 to 1980, and president of the Aquitaine Region from 1981 to 1985.

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