Municipal elections 2026 in Nice: the proposals of Mireille Damiano (Nice Popular Front)

On the eve of the first round of municipal elections, the editorial team of Nice Premium is offering you a series of identical interviews with list leaders who have agreed to our request. The objective is to help you better understand the positions taken by the various candidates in the Nice municipal election.

Three lists did not follow up despite several reminders: All for Nice (Christian Estrosi), for scheduling reasons; For the Reconquest of Nice (Cédric Vella), which did not honor its appointment; and The Best is Yet to Come (Eric Ciotti), which ignored our requests.

The four other lists, namely Nice People’s Front (Mireille Damiano), Nice Direct Democracy (Céline Forjonnel), Workers’ Struggle – The Workers’ Camp (Estelle Jaquet) and United for Nice (Juliette Chesnel-Le Roux), answered ten general questions and sent a message to Nice voters.

The first candidate to answer our questions is Mireille Damiano:

If you are elected, what would be your absolute priority for Nice during the first 100 days of your term?

“Based on the assessment we made, the situation regarding social issues and people in serious difficulty is absolutely disastrous. So we would launch as a real priority a major plan against precarity. Obviously, that includes many things. This plan would provide the possibility of welcoming, guiding and supporting all disadvantaged people, particularly families with children who are unfortunately currently homeless.

What will be your strategy regarding public space security?

We distinguish between everyday safety, which involves things not necessarily related to police services. I’ll give a small example: it can be nighttime lighting in certain neighborhoods to allow people to return home safely. It can also be on-demand tram stops and trams at night, any day of the week.

Regarding more specifically how we manage security with police forces, it’s community policing that is restored, if I may say so, with the aim and mission of proximity and prevention. That is, we redeploy, actually not by increasing the numbers, but by redeploying municipal police services with a focus on training, great attention to recruitment and the ability to be connected with neighborhood residents, but also with the associations developing there. The objective is to create a network allowing for recourse, if necessary, to people who are on the ground.

That’s everyday safety. What must be understood is that it’s imperative to clarify the distinction between missions assigned to municipal police and those assigned to national police, which we know may be somewhat understaffed here. It’s always the same: whenever we have a very strong municipal police, we have a less strong national police.

In this context, it means we don’t send municipal police “to the front” when it’s not their responsibility. Moreover, no private police, meaning no delegation of police or person control missions to private services, for example Gaïda (Inter-bailiff Agents Group Against Disorder and Abuse, Editor’s Note).

What concrete measures will you propose to address the housing crisis in Nice?

We need to keep two aspects in mind. The social housing aspect, where we point out — and it’s not unnecessary to say this each time — that we’re at 14% of social housing instead of 25%, and what’s currently planned won’t allow us to catch up.

This means we must clearly identify all possible square meters that could allow construction on already-used land. There’s no question of seeking land that could serve a rural function. We need the ability to combine construction possibilities or raising structures when possible. What seems very effective to us is strengthening social mix. To do this, we must lower the threshold below which social housing is not required in programs.

That’s the social housing aspect, with obviously the possibility of right of first refusal if necessary, since the city has all the means to do so.

Then there’s housing with a private stock. There, by definition, we must be attentive to controlling placement on the rental market, namely truly effective control of Airbnb. We went from 7 to 10 inspectors, but that won’t manage the 14,000 Airbnb listings on the platform.

So very strict control must be done on this front. There are also 30,000 vacant housing units, if I’m not mistaken, that need to be verified. We proposed that we obviously won’t dispossess a small owner who for a year or two doesn’t put their apartment up for rent. However, we must be able to know what we’re doing with it, implement real support and not hesitate to consider expropriation measures if necessary.

The flagship measure we plan to implement right away — obviously with prefectural approval — is rent control, which regulates the private rental market.

What mobility policy will you implement to reduce traffic congestion and improve daily transportation?

This is part of several objectives. The first, knowing that the cause of all traffic congestion remains the car. We have both people who don’t have one and who have the right to travel properly. Others have a car and unfortunately can’t do anything but use it because they’ve been pushed away from city centers due to housing policy and they need to come work. These problems must be solved by the will to reduce car usage as much as possible.

How do we reduce car usage? By improving transportation. Our proposal is to institute free transport, with attention to ensuring there’s no disruption. When people arrive at connection points, those living in the hills must be able to benefit from hill-based connections.

The first thing to avoid congestion is to reduce cars. For this not to be punitive, the question isn’t to say your car is so old we won’t let you drive anymore, we need to act on transportation.

Second, we must promote active mobility: the ability to walk around. We also need to redesign bike paths, where we’re very far behind, so they’re safe, have no breaks, aren’t zigzagging and are usable by everyone, including children.

We’re putting all this in place: bikes, fewer cars, walking when possible. Knowing that many trips are less than three kilometers, even by car… Something’s not right.

How will you support local downtown commerce?

The question of commerce involves private aspects. If local shops tend to either close or disappear, it’s because unfortunately we have a downtown that’s either mistreated or depopulating. As a result, neighborhood shops are hit hard, to the benefit of an explosion in certain large distribution stores that go hand-in-hand with organized complexes.

When you have a large enough complex, what happens? A major retailer sets up and causes small shops to collapse a bit. There are possible methods that involve support or commercial rent guarantees. I think mainly that revitalizing the neighborhood will allow shops to open.

I was reading a text that surprised me, but it’s reality: we’re observing a decrease in turnover for small and medium enterprises. It goes together. Once people can’t settle and premises are extremely expensive, rental prices explode for housing, but also for commercial spaces, everything becomes very expensive.

By definition, this high cost goes with, it seems to me, a particular policy aimed at making this city attractive. When we say attractive, it’s not in the right sense: we’re not attracting the people who live here, we’re rather attracting those passing through.

How will you guarantee equitable access to sports, culture and public facilities in all city neighborhoods?

We made a kind of assessment of what was happening, and we’re not wrong to link sports and culture. A number of structures exist in neighborhoods. I’m thinking for example of AnimaNice, which should probably be managed differently, as well as sports complexes.

I see many making proposals around large structures: a sports palace, a large theater, etc. The city must obviously equip itself with these types of infrastructure. Our point is to say that a pleasant city to live in is what we called the fifteen-minute city.

Within fifteen minutes of home, people should be able to have everything that makes up daily life: public services, but also access to culture and sports. This means developing neighborhood structures, sports or cultural, with perhaps agreements with existing institutions, for example the Opera or the Nice Ballets, to allow, in certain cultural structures, music learning or, in any case, to ensure that every child can discover and practice an instrument.

We can establish extremely relevant agreements and then perhaps implement the idea of a pass that is both a sports pass and a culture pass.

What will be your vision for protecting and developing Nice’s coastline in the face of climate change?

I think we may have been the only list to worry about risk issues. We developed a risk policy, that is, knowledge of risk. What we found is that we currently have no way to clearly assess, and especially update, the risks linked for example to mountain rivers like the Paillon or the Var, since the studies are extremely old. So we need to update them: it’s an absolute emergency!

The second emergency is knowing where we shouldn’t continue building. The example we gave is that of the Paillon riverbed, where Apollinaire High School is located. Besides the fact that it was built against all common sense because it’s in the wrong spot, if there were an episode today, which is still quite conceivable, we’d need to be able to react within two hours.

So the first idea is to adopt a precautionary principle. In this context, we must avoid maintaining dangerous structures for children: we need to relocate the high school.

It’s not about scaring people, but reassuring them by showing we have good knowledge of places, of the possible occurrence of a storm and its consequences. Everything must be done so we can quickly take action.

We must also stop saying we’re going to do who-knows-what at the Expo Palace, which is in a difficult zone, or move the Convention Center to a market garden that will be in a flood zone in a few years.

So there’s a precautionary principle, and especially the need for exact knowledge of the situation we don’t have today, which is moreover recognized by the city. This is part of the projects we must absolutely launch. It’s urgent !

How will you finance your program without increasing municipal debt or local taxes?

We must realize that, being outside the council chamber, we don’t have very easy access to files, except for budget publications. What we found is that there’s been multiplied tax pressure: property tax increased by 19.8%, if I’m not mistaken, and local tax bases were also raised.

Moreover, we can make certain savings. If we reduced communication spending, representation costs or penalties budgeted at 19.2 million euros for not respecting the SRU law, there would already be room.

There’s also a project to double municipal police staff, which would cost between 15 and 19 million euros. Not to mention cameras: going from 6,000 to 10,000 would represent about 120 million euros. All this is spending that needs to stop.

If we look at city and metropolitan budgets, we must be between 120 and 150 million euros each. If we simply used about ten percent for social aspects — and not for security or fake greening — we could finance projects without too much difficulty.

For transportation, other levers exist. Financing public transport can involve an evolution of the tourist tax, to bring it closer to what’s done in Paris, where amounts can be up to three times higher.

We can also act on mobility tax, or revise taxation of second homes. That wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, especially since, in parallel, within the housing framework, we’d seek to limit their number.

Finally, there’s a debt that will need to be controlled. Above all, { “@context”: “https://schema.org”, “@type”: “NewsArticle”, “headline”: “Municipal elections 2026 in Nice: the proposals of Mireille Damiano (Nice Popular Front)”, “datePublished”: “2026-03-14T09:00:00”, “author”: { “@type”: “Organization”, “name”: “Nice Premium” } }