- Tension rises a notch in Toulon, a few weeks from the municipal elections.
- Opponents of Hubert Falco have seized the prefect because they fear for the authenticity of the ballot.
- These fears are based on a survey by Le Monde Diplomatique on the management of the city by Hubert Falco.
The campaign for the municipal elections was clearly strained on Friday in Toulon, where four opponents of the mayor LR Hubert Falco, of LREM at the RN, asked the prefect to "take all the measures" to "guarantee the authenticity of the ballot", that they consider threatened.
These four top names, the MP La République en Marche (LREM) Cécile Muschotti, the candidates Amaury Navarranne (National Gathering), Olivier Lesage (“Oxygène Toulon” list) and Vincent Maurel (“My party is Toulon” list) ) delivered this letter after the publication of a survey in Le Monde Diplomatique in March on the management of the city directed by Hubert Falco for 18 years.
Suspicion of corruption
The latter, candidate for his re-election, said in a response to AFP that he did not "have to comment on gesticulations of political gutter politics" and that he had "started himself, there is a few weeks, legal proceedings against all the false allegations that punctuate this campaign ”. He "has no doubt that justice will restore the truth".
In their article, the journalists collected the assertions of residents who say they obtained their HLM by bribing a representative of a tenant association who sits on the allocation committees, which the latter denies. On this point, the Toulon public prosecutor's office confirmed that it had received a denunciation from the prefect of Var and opened a preliminary investigation.
A voter who died at the time of the vote
The prosecutor added that the justice “will be interested” in other facts revealed by the article: the testimonies of ten inhabitants of a peripheral district who assure not to have gone to vote in the second round of the legislative elections of 2017, then that the signing list is signed opposite their name. The monthly also claims that an eleventh person is presented as a voter while in prison at the time and has died since.
A judicial procedure "must be implemented in all impartiality and with the greatest respect of the law, and in particular of the presumption of innocence, to restore the truth", write the candidates to the prefect. For the municipal elections in March, they asked him to take "all the necessary measures to ensure (...) that the electoral operations will take place under the conditions required for a poll worthy of our Republic".
Clearly, these heads of lists wish for example the deployment of electoral "investigating commissioners" by the prefecture, or prevent municipal officials from holding polling stations, two of them explained to AFP, Amaury Navarranne and Cécile Muschotti. "We want clear guarantees to prevent electoral fraud," said the latter.
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- municipal
- LREM
- Toulon
- Election campaign
- Prefect
- National gathering