The second round of municipal elections, to be held on June 28, takes the form of a republican front against the far right in Perpignan, in the south of France. After the withdrawal on Thursday of the LREM candidate for the second round, it was the environmental candidate who threw in the towel on Saturday 30 May.

Neither Agnès Langevine, vice-president of the Occitanie Regional Council, nor Romain Grau, deputy and comrade in the promotion of Emmanuel Macron at the ENA, could not hope to catch up on the deputy National rally, Louis Aliot (35.6 %), and the outgoing mayor, Jean-Marc Pujol (18.5%). And a triangular, even a quadrangular, would have greatly favored the candidate of the far right. 

Saturday morning, the environmental candidate (14.5% of the vote) threw in the towel by invoking "a republican duty of public health", in a statement sent to AFP. "I call on all voters to use their vote to definitively confine the ambitions of the candidate of the National Rally and to vote for the list which remains opposed to him," she said.

>> To read: Municipales 2020: in Perpignan, the Louis Aliot temptation or "the choice out of spite"

And the ecologist adds: "I am afraid of seeing the Perpignanais.es direct their anger and their rage towards a mortal choice. That of the decline of the city, the withdrawal of identity and the deconfinement of hatred".

"Fragile Republican Front"

Thursday, it was the candidate LREM Romain Grau (13% in the first round) who had renounced, a "republican withdrawal" also aimed at preventing the Lepéniste party from seizing the town hall of this city of 120,000 inhabitants.

The boss of En Marche, Stanislas Guerini, welcomed the decision. "Giving up campaigning is a difficult decision but our line is clear: we will never be the footsteps of the FN", he had reacted. A candidate on the LREM list in Perpignan has, however, decided to support Louis Aliot. 

"On the road to a fragile republican front," headlined the local newspaper L'Indépendant, highlighting the gap in the first round between Aliot and Pujol.

In 2014, after a tight first round (34% for Aliot, 30.5% for Pujol), Mayor LR had clearly beaten the lebenist candidate in the second round (55% -45%), thanks to the withdrawal of the PS candidate and the good reporting of voices from other lists.

Jean-Marc Pujol, a 71-year-old lawyer, has been a city councilor since 1989 and mayor since 2009, when he succeeded his mentor Jean-Paul Alduy. His score in the first round (18.5%) is low for an outgoing mayor, but this pugnacious pied-noir is ready to do battle.

40 % participation in the first round

Louis Aliot made fun of these withdrawals, seeing in them "a scam which allows a failed and corrupt system to remain in place".

This 50-year-old lawyer behind the more moderate line of the RN thinks that this time, voters will not follow. "It's not easy to make a venomous anti-Pujol campaign, then to withdraw and to call to vote for him. The automatism of the republican front has stopped working since I was elected deputy (in 2017)", says he at AFP.

After three setbacks in the municipal elections, Louis Aliot has never been so close to winning the bet in Perpignan, 12 years after its establishment in the Catalan city.

Despite the calls to vote against him, the former companion of Marine Le Pen is optimistic: "There will no longer be the front of the refusal the last time. He has 32 points to go up and he was siphoned off part of its electorate ... The people in Perpignan got used to the vote in my favor, people know me ".

For him, the only uncertainty concerns participation. "This is the issue of the campaign. We do not measure very well whether people will travel to vote or not." In the first round, only 26,000 voters out of 66,000 registered went to the polls, an exceptionally low turnout of 40%.

With AFP

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