Nevers (AFP)
Macronism before Macron: in 2013, Denis Thuriot made Nevers a laboratory of "neither right nor left", tearing off the town hall after 43 years of socialism.
Today head of the LREM list for regional, he believes in the recipe to counter the RN threat in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté.
"I created the En Marche spirit in 2013 at the local level": Denis Thuriot did not "even know" that the training of Emmanuel Macron "would exist" a few years later when he brought together "in (his) cellar" a few support to delight Nevers from his old party, the PS.
His "unlabeled" list at the 2014 municipal elections "brought people together".
"There were only three elected out of 30, two of whom had been opposed to the other," he recalls for AFP.
"Maybe Nevers was a political laboratory," argues the lawyer with the good-looking face.
Coming second in the first round, far behind the PS, he succeeded in merging with the right and the center and won the capital of Nièvre.
"These labels no longer have any meaning. Dogma locks up thought," he concludes.
"Thuriot was three years ahead," recognizes one of his opponents, Thierry Boisdevezy, former deputy to the former mayor PS.
"He was a precursor of Macron's approach," he analyzes.
"It is the fruit of the bankruptcy of the PS, on a land marked by Pierre Bérégovoy (ex-mayor of Nevers, editor's note) and François Mitterrand", who led another city of Nièvre, Château-Chinon, underlines for his part a senior official from LREM, in Paris.
Emmanuel Macron, then minister, "is interested in this local experience", remembers Denis Thuriot, and "offers him an appointment" in spring 2016. A year later, it is in Nevers that Mr. Macron, this once a candidate for the presidency, made one of his first meetings.
The transplant takes and Emmanuel Macron sees an asset "territories" in Denis Thuriot, rare representative walker of an average agglomeration (57,000 inhabitants).
It is therefore this time under the LREM label that in 2020, Denis Thuriot is re-elected in the first round.
"He won in all the polling stations, which Bérégovoy had not even managed to do", recalls the leader of the LREM senators, the Côte d'Orien François Patriat, president of the support committee of Denis Thuriot .
- "RN attenuator" -
But above all, it pushes back the far right.
"I am a weakener of the RN", he welcomes, an asset in this region which could switch in favor of the party of Marine Le Pen.
"In 2015, it was played out little", recalls the political scientist Claude Patriat, of the University of Burgundy.
In the second round of the last regional, only two percentage points had separated the FN from the socialist Marie-Guite Dufay, current president of the region.
"I want to show that there is an alternative" to the extreme right, which is against "my left orientation," replied Mr. Thuriot.
Born on August 19, 1966 in an illustrious family of Nevers "partly to the right, partly to the left", Denis Thuriot married the bar in 1992, like his father, and carved out a reputation for himself as "lawyer of the homeless. papers "filed on the left.
He naturally joined the PS but he "saw people there who did not speak to each other within the same party".
It therefore flies with its own wings.
"By opportunism", accuses Delphine Fleury, socialist vice-president of the Departmental Council of Nièvre.
"He's been riding the wave of change. Sailing," she said.
"I am not an opportunist", responds the person concerned.
"I had this position even before En Marche existed. I did not do it three days before the presidential election."
Today, Denis Thuriot says he is "convinced that what is possible in Nevers is possible on a regional scale".
A February poll places him in second position in the first round of the regional, behind the RN but ahead of the PS.
"The door is not closed", answers Denis Thuriot when we mention an agreement for the second round with the outgoing Marie-Guite Dufay (PS), who voted Emmanuel Macron in the first round in 2017.
"Yes, there are discussions between Dufay and Thuriot", assures Delphine Fleury.
© 2021 AFP