Strasbourg (AFP)

Grenoble environmental mayor Eric Piolle, who came to Strasbourg on Wednesday to support the candidate EELV Jeanne Barseghian, castigated the "owners of the system", placing in this category the socialist Catherine Trautmann whose list goes alone in the second round.

In Strasbourg, environmentalists face "the owners of the system who do not understand what is happening and throw anathemas", pointed out Mr. Piolle during a press conference alongside Jeanne Barseghian.

According to him, the latter's list expresses the aspirations of a "cultural majority" faced with the "somewhat crazy message of this anti-climate arc that we see forming everywhere with these LREM-LR alliances".

Jeanne Barseghian came largely in the lead in the first round but found herself in difficulty for the second lack of agreement with the socialist list and facing an LREM-LR alliance.

The mayor of Grenoble opposed two currents of social democracy, that of "owners embodied here by Catherine Trautmann and who has not changed much since the 1980s", and that of Anne Hidalgo in Paris or Johanna Rolland to Nantes for whom social and environmental issues are "fundamentally intertwined".

"What is experienced here is a fringe of the PS which has this culture of ownership and prefers to collapse with it rather than to change culture," he insisted.

Jeanne Barseghian highlighted the "tremendously inspiring" character, particularly in terms of governance, of the experiment carried out in Grenoble, the only large French city headed by EELV.

With almost 47% of the votes in the first round for his EELV-LFI-PCF list, Eric Piolle is heading for a second consecutive mandate in his city.

Jeanne Barseghian's position is far from being as comfortable after the failure of negotiations with former socialist mayor Catherine Trautmann.

With nearly 28% of the vote, the head of the environmental list had outstripped LREM candidate Alain Fontanel by 8 points in the first round, but he has since merged with LR Jean-Philippe Vetter. Their lists had won 38% of the vote on March 15.

"I obviously regret that the merger could not be done. My opponent is not Catherine Trautmann, it is Alain Fontanel, it is this alliance with Jean-Philippe Vetter without any project", underlined Ms. Barseghian.

© 2020 AFP