Regional 2021: reelected, Renaud Muselier deprives the far right of a victory in Paca

Published on : 06/28/2021 – 11:00

The polls predicted a strong advance in the regional elections on the far right, but the National Rally did not ultimately win any region. Widely beaten by the outgoing right-wing president in Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, Renaud Muselier, the former LR Thierry Mariani failed in his challenge to win the region, the only stronghold that the far-right party seemed able to be able to win.

After Jean-Marie Le Pen, three times candidate for the National Front in the region (in 1992, 1998 and 2010), then his granddaughter, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, in 2015, the former minister of Nicolas Sarkozy had campaigned for the party now led by Marine Le Pen, the daughter of the founder of the movement.

Despite a 4.5 point lead in the first round (36.4% against 31.9%), the MEP RN was finally beaten by Renaud Muselier, who won by nearly 15 points, with 57 , 3% of the vote.

“I won, we won”, “the logic of unity” has “contradicted all the forecasts”, declared the president of the Regions of France, insisting on the “logic of gathering” which he had engaged before the first round including including Walkers on his list.

In his HQ in Joliette, facing the port, Renaud Muselier thus greeted “the members of the presidential majority” who “extended a hand to him from the start of the campaign”: “There is no political experience, just an addition of skills. (…) In life, you have to have a backbone and you have to know how to add, “he insisted, dismissing the idea that his list is the index of a” recomposition policy “between Republicans and Marchers, as Prime Minister Jean Castex had put forward at the beginning of May, causing a real psychodrama within the LR staff.

In front of his defeated supporters, also in Marseille, his opponent Thierry Mariani, for his part, denounced the victory of Renaud Muselier as that of any “coalition system”.

Success of the Republican front as in 2015

Believing to have delivered “an unequal battle”, the European deputy RN underlined that “the last three presidents of the Republic (had) flown to the aid” of his adversary and accused the media of having “sometimes derogated from the rules of the most elementary deontology “:” It is a defeat for democracy and the expression of the popular will “.

The only outgoing regional president not to have finished first in the first round, Renaud Muselier had received between the two rounds the support of many personalities, from former President LR Nicolas Sarkozy to his socialist successor François Hollande via Bernard Tapie, Minister of the City of François Mitterrand and majority shareholder of the regional daily La Provence.

Even Eric Ciotti, LR deputy of the Alpes-Maritimes, who had asked that the party withdraw its support after its alliance with the Marchers, had finally called to vote in his favor. If the abstention, to 63.2%, fell by three points between the two rounds, it remained much stronger than in the second round of the regional 2015 (39.7%) which had already given rise to a duel right-extreme right, with Christian Estrosi facing Marion Maréchal-Le Pen.

In the end, Renaud Muselier’s victory is even larger than that of the mayor of Nice, to whom he succeeded in the chair of regional president in May 2017: Christian Estrosi, behind 14 points in the first round, had certainly made a impressive “remountada”, more than doubling its score between the two rounds, with some 600,000 additional votes. But he had won only ten points (54.8% against 45.2%).

As in 2015, the left list, qualified for the second round, finally made the choice this year also to withdraw to block the far right. And the 195,000 voters of Jean-Laurent Félizia (16.9%), ecological leader of the Ecological and Social Rally, visibly imitated – at least in part – those of Christophe Castaner, then socialist, in 2015, by opting for “the republican front” in the second round.

“The Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region remains in the bosom of the Republic. I welcome this and wish its President good luck,” greeted the PS mayor of Marseille, Benoît Payan, on Twitter.

With AFP