There were the first gestures, essentially symbolic, such as the removal of European flags from the pediments of certain town halls newly conquered by the RN in the last municipal elections. Three months after the second round which saw the RN come to power in around sixty municipalities, bringing their total number to more than 70, these new mayors were able to begin to stamp their style. Particularly in terms of socio-cultural policy, like the mayor of Carpentras (Vaucluse) who approved an already very symbolic municipal subsidy of 3,000 for family planning.
New directions that the National Observatory of the Far Right (Oned) did not fail to scrutinize, which launched a collaborative variation on the new RN town halls in order to compile measures which would be as many markers of the far right, which has taken control of many municipalities for the first time.
Shot of firedamp on the unions
“These are often medium-sized municipalities, sometimes small, but which are always laboratories of the extreme right,” says 20 MinutesThomas Portes, president of the Observatory and LFI deputy for Seine-Saint-Denis. “And these markers – cultural orientation, attacks against unions, against social and associative systems, or even the reception of foreign nationals, lists the elected official, have been identified in 30% to 35% of newly RN municipalities.”
Starting with the new mayor of Carcassonne (Aude), Christophe Barthès, who went head to head with a municipal anti-begging decree in the medieval town, took a handful of days after his election. Despite the recent rejection of his request to withdraw a work by the Franco-Moroccan artist Mehdi-Georges Lahlou, the exhibition not falling under his municipality, he has not given up by recently refusing the provision of a room to organize the vote of Algerians abroad, called to the polls on July 2, while sending the bailiffs to the Labor Exchange to notify the unions of their departure from these municipal premises occupied for almost 100 years by the CGT, report The World et The Midi Daily. Reproaching them for their participation in a demonstration against the extreme right.
In the same vein, the new RN mayor of Liévin (Pas-de-Calais) decided to do without unions for the ceremony organized every May 1 in the town hall, commemorating a firedamp attack which, in 1974, left 42 dead in this mining town, being content with a wreath of flowers, says Franceinfo.
Un octogone préféré à Napoléon
Another city, another register, in Vauvert in the Gard, where the 65,000 euros in subsidies paid to the jazz festival – which moved to a neighboring town – gives way to the return of bullfighting, nine years after the last one. Less traditional but no less bloody, MMA will find a special place in the cultural programming of La-Seyne-sur-Mer. In Var Morning, its recently elected mayor, Dorian Munoz, explains that he sees it as “a niche to take, in terms of events” and gets rid of a street art festival and the annual celebration of the capture of Toulon by Napoleon “With a disproportionate budget”, decided the new RN councilor.
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In the South again, in Bagnols-sur-Ceze (Gard), mayor Pascale Bordes has cut down the cultural programming, canceling the visits of the Franco-Lebanese trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf, the choreographer Mourad Merzouki and the comedian Muriel Robin, listed The Chained Duck. Further north, in Harnes (Pas-de-Calais), the organization of a film debate relating to the queer universe has changed hands in favor of a new association freshly created and chaired by an elected official from the new far-right majority.
Taking charge of the cultural and social agenda of the municipalities which goes hand in hand with that on associative life. This Wednesday, the municipality of Perpignan of Louis Aliot, re-elected in the first round last spring, voted for a revision of the regulations for awarding subsidies providing in particular for “the priority use of academic French in their institutional communication” and “participation at the commemorative ceremonies of November 11, May 8 and July 14,” warns an opposition elected official.
