Can the scooter vote go wrong for Hidalgo?

• On Sunday April 2, Parisian voters will be invited to go to the voting booth to vote on whether or not to maintain the

  free-floating

  scooter service , as Mayor Anne Hidalgo announced on Saturday.

• This announcement took everyone by surprise, no one expecting a vote on such a subject.

  It is also the first local referendum organized by the capital since the constitutional revision of 2003.

• Until now, only one metropolis had used such a process, Strasbourg, in 2011, on the question of the passage to 30 km / h.

  The lessons of this failure, which had lasting consequences, can help to imagine what the Parisian vote will look like.

Anne Hidalgo's announcement of a vote on April 2 on whether or not to maintain self-service scooters took everyone by surprise.

Starting with the operators.

“It was a total surprise!

We expected everything but not that, ”says one of them.

As proof, after sending a press release in which they welcomed "the decision to consult the Parisians", they decided on a

total media

Likewise, the elected representatives of the Changer Paris group, if they say they are "surprised that Anne Hidalgo is calling Parisians to vote on the chaos that she organized herself", had not adopted their position on this ballot on Monday.

It must be said that this is the first time that such a vote has been organized on the scale of the capital.

Allowed by the constitutional revision of 2003, the local referendum has only very rarely been used by medium-sized and large towns.

This was nevertheless the case in Strasbourg in 2011 regarding the passage of a large part of the city to 30 km/h.

“When we decided to submit this proposal to the vote, it was obvious that the yes was going to prevail, remembers Alain Jund, then green assistant for town planning with the PS mayor Roland Ries.

In the neighborhood councils, we felt an appetite for this measure and all the arguments were green.

It was so obvious that only those who were against campaigned, like the Automobile Club, the CCI…”

“Only the haters move”

And finally, after the counting of the 50,121 ballots collected by mail, it is the no that wins at 54.9%.

“It is clear that we have not campaigned enough”, regrets the ecologist, still elected local in Strasbourg.

“Roland Ries wanted to kill two birds with one stone with participation and ecology, comments a Strasbourg resident who followed the campaign well.

But in 2011, it was perhaps too avant-garde and it is also the problem of participation, only move the haters and not those who are favorable without more.

»

“We are going to think about how to take people to the polls”, we also indicate within one of the operators, suggesting an upcoming mobilization.

The latter indeed fear a very low turnout which could put them at a disadvantage and above all, based on the last national elections, they note that “those who go to the polls are mainly elderly people”, not very fond of electric scooters.

The municipality has indeed announced a physical vote even if the modalities of places are not yet specified.

An electronic consultation would thus undoubtedly have been much more favorable to the operators even if during a recent call for testimonies,

had received nearly 70% of contributions in favor of the ban.

Environmentalists in battle order

Similarly with this vote, the municipality moves the confrontation on a ground that it knows well, that of the election, that the operators control much less.

As soon as the announcement was made, David Belliard, the environmental assistant in charge of roads and resolutely opposed to maintaining the service, posted on Twitter the link to a platform “Apaisonsnosrues” in order to start the mobilization.

“We are going to talk about it this week, look at how to mobilize activists”, abounds Frédéric Badina, ecological adviser to the town hall of Paris.

On the other hand Rémi Féraud, president of the socialist group at the Council of Paris, indicates that his group will encourage to go to vote but without necessarily campaigning for yes or no.

On April 2, we will be able to vote whether or not we want to continue with self-service #scooters 🗳️

My choice is made.

Dangerous, bulky, not green, to appease our streets, let's say NO to free-floating electric scooters 💁 https://t.co/VgDw9Kng1k https://t.co/d5Tv69GEJO

— David Belliard (@David_Belliard) January 14, 2023

Access to this content has been blocked to respect your choice of consent

By clicking on "

", you accept the deposit of cookies by external services and will thus have access to the content of our partners

I ACCEPT

And to better remunerate 20 Minutes, do not hesitate to accept all cookies, even for one day only, via our "I accept for today" button in the banner below.

More information on the Cookie Management Policy page.

But the weapon of the local referendum must be handled with care.

Because if the defeat of 2011 did not prevent the re-election of Roland Ries to the municipal elections of 2014, "the question of 30 km / h has since been a taboo subject, even within the new ecological majority", deplores Alain Jund.

This is probably why Grenoble decided to do without it to adopt the 30 km/h limit.

"It's a micro-subject"

And that's probably also why Anne Hidalgo chose this minor subject to make it the subject of a vote: a flop on electric scooters wouldn't prevent her from sleeping.

"It's a micro-subject, denounces Nelly Garnier, elected opposition LR.

There are much more impactful subjects that could have been submitted to the vote of Parisians such as crack, property tax, the redevelopment of the Trocadéro.

“Even environmentalists would have liked referendums on” more structuring subjects like the Olympics “, comments Frédéric Babina, even if he finds “rather nice to put Parisians back at the heart of the decision”.

Gilles Jund, he returned from the local referendums.

He wonders about the relevance of a consultation on a whole city on this type of subject: “We are in the process of launching the construction of new tram lines and some are asking us for a referendum.

But the change often generates tension and, after the fact, the opposing people find that the tram, in the end, is very good.

The elected official also wonders about the scope of the voters: the users, the only residents, the inhabitants of other municipalities?

A point that the operators did not fail to underline in their press release where they deplore the exclusion from this vote of “the Ile-de-France residents and foreigners who live and bring Paris to life on a daily basis”.

Finally, concerning the mayor of Paris, there is always the risk that the referendum turns to the personal question.

"I would like it not to be a vote for or against Anne Hidalgo [who called for a no vote]", hopes Frédéric Babina.

"There is an expectation of Parisians to express their dissatisfaction with Anne Hidalgo's management of the question of mobility", winds Nelly Garnier, who would not sulk her pleasure if the PS mayor tripped over the carpet.

“The referendum crystallizes all the difficulties, the discomforts, concludes Alain Jund.

And the answer is always different from the question asked.

» 

Paris

Paris: The future of self-service electric scooters will be the subject of a citizen vote

Company

Self-service scooters: The government refuses the ban but is working on "a regulatory plan"

• Paris

• Ile-de-France

• betting tip

• Anne Hidalgo

• Scooter

• Strasbourg

• Great East

• Referendum

• David Belliard