Le Havre (AFP)
Arriving at the head of the first round of the municipal elections in Le Havre, Prime Minister Edouard Philippe is preparing to face in the second round a duel against the PCF deputy Jean-Paul Lecoq whose score created the surprise on Sunday.
The ex-juppeist, who had been elected in the first round in 2014, collected 43.60% of the vote before the PCF deputy (35.88%), the municipal councilor of opposition EELV, allied with the PS, Alexis Deck (8 , 28%) and the RN candidate (7.31%).
"We have an unfavorable Prime Minister on waivers in Le Havre," commented Guillaume Peltier, vice-president of LR on France 2 Sunday evening.
"In no case," retorted the outgoing mayor of Le Havre Jean-Baptiste Gastinne, interviewed by AFP. "With 44% in the first round and eight points ahead of the second, the result is very encouraging. The Havraises and Le Havres put us quite clearly in the lead," said the suspended representative of LR when he is allied in January with the Prime Minister for the municipal elections.
If Mr. Gastinne considers "very dangerous" to add the scores of the two main lists on the left, he "notes that in the left block, the Communist came first. It is a kind of turning back in Le Havre" . The port city, which remains sociologically on the left, shifted to the right in 1995 after three Communist decades.
Jean-Paul Lecoq is no less surprised by his score.
"Even we, we had not hoped. We said to ourselves + if we approach 30% we will be happy +. We are at 36% it is rather interesting. It creates a dynamic," said the AFP the deputy who had won a PS constituency in 2017.
An Ifop poll published on March 4, before the announcement of the use of 49-3, Edouard Philippe with 42% of the vote, against 25% for Jean-Paul Lecoq, and 16% for the EELV Alexis Deck. The RN appeared there at 10%.
For the PCF deputy, the result of Sunday is "tight" and reflects in particular what the people of Le Havre think of a "Prime Minister who comes to be head of the list, who leaves, who says that he will not be mayor, then that 'he cannot run the campaign because he is Prime Minister. "
- "fairly open game" -
Edouard Philippe has warned since his engagement in the campaign that if he was elected, Jean-Baptiste Gastinne would remain mayor as long as he himself was in Matignon.
"Why did he come to conduct an electoral campaign when at the time when he was a candidate we knew very well that the virus was going to arrive, that the retirement law was being discussed in the National Assembly?" Added the man who was from 1995 to 2017 PCF mayor of Gonfreville-L'Orcher, industrial commune of the Le Havre conurbation.
In a city very mobilized against the pension reform, the tenure of Edouard Philippe, who was mayor of Le Havre from 2010 to 2017, was degraded twice and clashes occurred during demonstrations in the margins of his meetings.
"The second round will be a duel between two personalities, two programs," continues Jean-Baptiste Gastinne.
Faced with a still very high abstention (60.42%), Jean-Paul Lecoq still hopes to convince the electorate of working-class neighborhoods to go more to the polls.
But the question is also to know if it will succeed in uniting the divided lefts in particular on the closure of the coal-fired power station at Le Havre. "For the second round, we will gather all the voters on the left who have scattered their votes because there were several lists," he said.
Is a merger with the EELV-PS list topical?
"We will see what their proposals are," says Jean-Paul Lecoq.
Asked by AFP, on the union of the left in the second round Alexis Deck replied: "for the moment we are focused on the health issue which goes beyond municipal issues. We need better visibility on the holding or not of the second round ". "We are not against the postponement of the ballot," added the elected municipal "disappointed" with his score and considering the "game fairly open".
© 2020 AFP