After two failures in the municipal elections, the far-right candidate Louis Aliot finally won, on Sunday June 28, the city of Perpignan. It is the first victory of the National Rally (RN) in a city of more than 100,000 inhabitants since Toulon, conquered in 1995.

"We have won. It is a system that is crumbling. We have had the same political staff in Perpignan at the helm since 1959. It was becoming unhealthy," Louis Aliot told AFP at his campaign office in of his closest collaborators. "The Perpignan people, the Catalans send a sign to the whole of France. There is no wall that cannot be demolished, this Republican front was a scam."

In favorable ballot after the first round (35.6% against 18.4% to Jean-Marc Pujol) and facing a fragile "republican front", Louis Aliot won Sunday between 53 and 54% of the vote, according to estimates from three pollsters.

In this city of 120,000, 66,800 voters were asked to vote on Sunday. Despite the summer weather and the proximity of the beaches, a quarter of an hour from Perpignan, participation was higher than that of the first round (47% against 40%).

"It is with infinite sadness that I cash in the results. As we feared, and despite all our efforts to clear an electoral route that would have avoided this deleterious duel, the worst is taking over the controls of our city ", reacted Agnès Langevine, third in the first round with 14.5% of the vote, who withdrew in favor of Jean-Marc Pujol.

In Carpentras, defeat in a symbolic city for the far right

In addition, the extreme right lost its bet to gain the town of Carpentras. Tucked behind the former number two of the army, General Bertrand de la Chesnaie, the RN was beaten by the mayor Serge Andrieu, largely in the lead (45.81% of vote), obtaining 39.17% of suffrage. The candidate Claude Melquior (Les Républicains) collected 15% of the votes. 60.74% of the voters abstained.

Facing the far right, "the Carpentrassiens have always held, well held. I only wish one thing, that Carpentras stops being the city that the National Rally has been seeking for years, because they cannot win with us! ", responded Serge Andrieu on France 3 Provence.

"I have two disappointments, the monstrous abstention and the demonstration that if we had made the union on the right, it would have passed", declared to AFP Bertrand de la Chesnaie, denouncing "a big bullshit" of the party Les Republicans who maintained themselves.

At the start of the campaign, the National Rally hoped for a victory in this symbolic city for the party, thirty years after the desecration of the Jewish cemetery by skinheads. The moral responsibility of Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the National Front, was pointed out at the time.

It was in one of the constituencies of this city that Marion Maréchal, the niece of Marine Le Pen and granddaughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, was elected MP in 2012. The latter had then estimated that the "affront" to his name was thus "washed".

With AFP

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