Yesterday was mayoral elections here in France. The mayor of Lyon, Grégory Doucet, was up for re-election (he was elected to his first term in 2020). His main opponent, Jean-Michel Aulas, is a businessman who promised to run the city like one of his ventures.
(I can’t think of any similar situations that have gone horribly wrong).
Fun fact: Doucet is an Ecologist. That’s both a descriptor (hooray for all of the green initiatives here) and a political party.
Not so fun fact: Aulas wants to spend a few billion dollars to build a tunnel under the city to “reduce congestion.”
[Stares in Big Dig.]
Mayoral elections here in France don’t happen via direct vote. Instead, the electorate votes for city councilors. They, in turn, elect the mayor. Kinda like how prime ministers get elected. The councilors are presented in list format. You vote for your preferred list.
It’s a multi-party system, so two rounds of voting are assumed. If one of the candidate lists happens to get one more than 50% of the vote off the bat, they win outright. If not, there’s a run-off. Any candidate that gets less than 10% of the vote is removed from the ballot and then everyone votes again a week later. To win, you just need the most votes on that 2nd ballot, so it’s possible to win with less than half of the votes.
Everyone expected Aulas to win in a landslide, aka to get that 50% + 1 share of the vote. Instead, Doucet and Aulas basically tied, with Doucet coming out slightly ahead. The only other candidate to get a qualifying 10% of the vote was Anaïs Belouassa-Cherifi from the far-left LFI party. She’s offered to drop out (because her voters will presumably vote for Doucet) if Doucet agrees to merge their lists.
This is basically me trying to understand how this all works:
Some of the mayoral elections yesterday went to far-right candidates, so we were pleasantly surprised that Doucet beat his numbers.
I read an article in Le Monde the other day about how environmentalism is basically a mainstream position in France these days. Things like pedestrian zones used to be hugely controversial, but now they’re basically table stakes. It turns out, it’s really nice to walk around breathing clean air and not worry about getting hit by cars. As someone who moved to Europe because she wanted to walk around breathing clean air, I support this trend.
We’ll see how things go next week, but I’m cautiously optimistic.
