“We are not going to have a year of municipal campaign anyway …” Within La République en Marche, not all managers display the same caution as Richard Ferrand. If the President of the National Assembly declared on France 2 on Tuesday that it would be impossible to campaign properly if the second round of municipal elections was held on June 28, others believe it is time to move on.
This is the option that was chosen and announced this Friday by Édouard Philippe and Christophe Castaner. With the obvious downside linked to the evolution of the Covid-19 epidemic, which will feed an opinion of the scientific council validating or invalidating the choice of June 28. The Prime Minister even announced that a bill, presented to the Council of Ministers on May 27, would immediately provide for a scenario of postponement after September, or even January 2021.
Big cities, first concerned
If the date of June 28 is validated, the difficulties will remain because indeed, as Richard Ferrand pointed out, a campaign in a municipality of a few hundred inhabitants is not the same as in a big city.
However, the nearly 5,000 where a waiver remained after the first round of March 15 are, mainly, the largest in France. They bring together more than 16 million voters, or a third of the electorate. Health conditions, physical distance, restrictions on gatherings, queues to be expected in front of polling stations … All this will undeniably have an impact on the conduct of the poll and, even more than in the first round, on participation that it will arouse.
Does the government, and more specifically LaREM, have any interest in postponing the two rounds of these elections to September or January? The Council of State having judged impossible that the delay between first and second rounds goes beyond the summer, that would thus oblige to rewind the whole process in these nearly 5000 cities. With what that implies new campaign logistics to deploy and bitterness for the candidates who arrived, after all, legitimately in the lead.
In addition, a new postponement would have a domino effect on the senators of September, but that is another story.
The PS and LR reinforced
Politically, a second round sent at the end of June would have the advantage of depoliticizing a disastrous electoral sequence for the macronie.
Beyond the quack around maintaining the first round at the start of the epidemic (a choice whose health consequences have all been shown to be relative), The score for the presidential movement was poor. As recently counted Le Figaro, in all of the cities with more than 10,000 inhabitants, the central block LaREM-MoDem-Agir-UDI received just over 18% of the votes cast.
Thus, this bloc came far behind that of the moderate left (Socialist and Radical Party), which obtained more than 29%, and especially that of the non-Lepéniste right, which came first with 32.4% of the vote.
Poor LaREM scores
This political reality is reflected, for LaREM, by the prospect of a lack of local roots, three years after coming to power. This is the case in symbolic cities – the most visible – such as Bordeaux, Rennes, Lille, Lyon, Paris and Marseille, where the walker candidates obtained scores ranging from poor to disastrous.
In the capital, for example, only two of Agnès Buzyn’s twenty district lists came out on top of the first round. In both cases, they are both outgoing mayors and LR defectors. Added to this is the fact that the candidate dubbed by LaREM has largely compromised, in the eyes of her troops, by evoking the government’s preparation for the pandemic due to the coronavirus. So much so that the name of the party’s general delegate, Stanislas Guerini, was mentioned behind the scenes to possibly replace Agnès Buzyn, when she herself was propelled after the fall of Benjamin Griveaux.
“It is certain that to hold the poll in June, it avoids Stan to be the possible ‘recourse’ and to burn out in Paris”, summarizes a member of the executive office of LaREM.
The Philippe au Havre case
Generally, voters favored outgoing mayors. This applies to the government headliners who came to their fiefdom, notably Gérald Darmanin in Tourcoing and Édouard Philippe in Le Havre.
If the Minister of Action and Public Accounts was triumphantly reelected in the first round, the Prime Minister is still on the ballot. Enough to leave its political future in abeyance, a possible defeat at Le Havre making it impractical to keep it at Matignon and a victory Conversely, strengthening it. This may seem minimal, but it is clear that the potential national impact of this specific election.
Finally, for the government, comes the challenge of the local response to the epidemic itself. As Édouard Philippe mentioned during his press briefing this Friday, holding the second round on June 28 would speed up the final establishment of municipal councils and, thus, establish “the key role that municipalities and the intermunicipalities will have in the resumption and the revival of the public order “.
More prosaically, the head of government affirmed that “democratic life” should “also recover its rights”, while warning that the June 28 poll would not be “a second round as before”.
Passed by losses and profits, these municipal will not have been an additional stage in the political recomposition of the country. For the government, however, they have become an essential step in confronting the population with the Covid-19 epidemic. In this context, it is difficult to elect a “good” choice. Édouard Philippe said it himself on April 28 at the National Assembly:
“Right now, I’m choosing between bad decisions.”
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