The socialist team will certainly have to suffer this weekend during the first round of the 2015 departmental elections. One can even imagine that next Sunday will be the only round for almost all the candidates.
Caught between the powerful UMP war machine, which manages all the levers of local power and has succeeded over the years in organizing a clan and clientelist system that has proven effective, and an FN benefiting from the general context with candidates showing a steely morale, the socialists could, with few exceptions, be absent from the first public meeting of the newly elected Departmental Council.
In fact, the lack of an agreement with the Left Front makes participation in the second round almost impossible in a sociologically conservative department where the republican right is sometimes hard to distinguish from the more “extremist” side, so much so that the central thread of the outgoing president’s (and certainly renewed) Eric Ciotti’s politics is driven by principles and actions manifestly “right-wing,” and even more so in terms of affinities.
The new departmental secretary Xavier Garcia must be acknowledged for a serious attempt to consolidate the left in the Cรดte d’Azur.
The national-level choice of the left-frontists, suicidal in more than one way, is to oppose the government’s policy, which they deem not left-wing enough, resulting in having fewer (or almost no) elected representatives… but, the honor is preserved!
And then, to conclude, the floor must go to the voters, who always have good reasons to vote for some rather than others.
Nothing special and no surprises: That’s democracy!
