ANALYSIS
Candidates qualified for the second round of municipal elections, scheduled for June 28, must have submitted their list Tuesday at 6 pm. A few hours before the deadline, the alliance game accelerates. Thus, in Paris, the Greens chose during the night to rally the outgoing mayor, Anne Hidalgo, after hours of negotiations. They are expected to secure around twenty councilor seats, double the number from the previous term.
Another last-minute alliance: Bordeaux, where there has been no second round since 1947. The outgoing mayor LR Nicolas Florian can count since Monday evening on the reinforcement of the walker Thomas Cazenave. This merger of lists gives oxygen to the successor of Alain Juppé, who arrived in the first round before the environmental candidate with only 96 additional votes.
Triangulars in big cities
In Lille, on the other hand, it will be each for himself. Martine Aubry did not find an agreement with the ecologist Stéphane Baly. In the battle, there will be a third list, that of the walker Violette Spillebout, former chief of staff to… Martine Aubry.
On the Strasbourg side, the lists have not yet been tabled because behind the scenes negotiations are continuing between the ecologists and former mayor Catherine Trautmann. By midday on Tuesday, negotiations for the posts had not yet been completed. Two other candidates can hope to remain: those of LR and LREM, both around 19%.
The Old World Strikes Back
For political scientist Bernard Sananès, president of the Elabe Institute, these last-minute negotiations are explained by the unusual delay between the two rounds, this election having been put on hold by the health crisis triggered by Covid-19. The discussions thus had plenty of time to drag on, and the negotiations in some cases to get bogged down. These municipal elections should not, however, be marked by a upheaval comparable to that of the presidential and legislative elections in 2017.
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"There are new forces in these municipalities, notably En Marche, but which will appear as one of the losers in these elections," analyzes Europe 1 microphone Bernard Sananès, president of the Elabe institute. "When we look at the projections, there are ultimately few LREM flags that could be planted by the presidential party on the evening of the second round."
For this political scientist, local issues therefore continue very largely to revolve around an opposition between the republican right and the social democratic left. "There should be fairly strong stability between the balances of the old world: the right and the left."
An expected breakthrough for ecologists
With a nuance however: "It is the ecologists who should mark a significant progression, especially in the big cities. They succeeded in representing the alternation in the political space of left", points out Bernard Sananès, who evokes the case of Bordeaux , Toulouse or Strasbourg.