Bordeaux (AFP)

Bordeaux Métropole, where nearly 800,000 inhabitants live, elected a socialist president on Friday, the mayor of Mérignac Alain Anziani, allied with the Greens of Pierre Hurmic, causing this grouping of 28 municipalities to swing to the left after more than four decades of right-left co-management .

Since the creation of this community of communes in 1967, its first president Jacques Chaban-Delmas had initiated this principle of right-left co-management.

But, after 73 years of reign of the right at the town hall of Bordeaux, the election of the Green allied to the left Pierre Hurmic changed the situation for Bordeaux Métropole where the three groups environmentalist, socialist and right / center from the municipalities are about equal strength.

The new mayor of Bordeaux had warned that he wished to put an end to this system of co-management at the Metropolis, conducted under six presidents, three from the left and three from the right.

Co-management, "it is a system of barter between mayors. It is always done to the detriment of the general metropolitan interest (…) which is not the addition of strictly municipal interests. The functioning of the metropolis is is a bit + you vote my big stadium, I vote your pool + ", he denounced recently in an interview with AFP.

"We must also take into account the will of the voters, who for the most part have positioned themselves for change, for ecology for left-wing executives," he added.

"It's a historic day," said Pierre Hurmic on Friday after the election of Alain Anziani. "This new governance is nothing extraordinary", it is "the recognition of the majority fact" as in Nantes, Lyon, Strasbourg or Grenoble, argued the mayor of Bordeaux, himself elected first vice-president of the Metropolis.

Alain Anziani, 69, was previously part of this co-management system, ensuring a vice-presidency like others of his colleagues on the left under Alain Juppé then his successor Patrick Bobet.

This time, all the vice-presidencies were to return to the elected officials of the Green-Left alliance.

Gray beard and glasses, lawyer like Pierre Hurmic, former senator from the Gironde, Alain Anziani has been mayor since 2014 of Mérignac, economic heart and second city of the agglomeration with some 70,000 inhabitants.

Calling despite everything to "a large gathering", Mr. Anziani recognized that the Metropolis was "behind" in accompanying its development. "We have all been surprised by the development of the Metropolis," he said.

Even before the start of the election, LR Patrick Bobet, who had succeeded Alain Juppé last year as President of the Metropolis, denounced this new type of "governance from which we have been bluntly excluded".

"You fired us," he said, inviting elected officials from the right and from the center to leave the room, followed in particular by the former mayor of Bordeaux, LR Nicolas Florian, beaten by Pierre Hurmic at the last municipal elections.

Without right-wing elected officials present, Alain Anziani's victory was rapid, elected in the first round by 65 of 66 votes cast.

The one that was probably missing was that of Philippe Poutou, elected NPA of Bordeaux, who also stood in the ballot to represent "social anger" and collected a vote.

© 2020 AFP