French President Emmanuel Macron held a marathon seven-hour conference with local mayors in Normandy on Tuesday, the start of a national consultation on policy issues follwing the rolling 'yellow vest' protests, but caused controversy with disparaging comments about some in economic difficulty.
Mayors from across France have staged demonstrations against reduced funding from central government. However, the right-wing mayor who is behind the protests oversaw similar cuts in 2011 when he was budget minister. Meanwhile President Hollande, who is overseeing the current funding squeeze, opposed such moves when he was in opposition. But as Hubert Huertas argues, while there's more than a whiff of hypocrisy about the protests, they could nonetheless be damaging to the socialist government and the head of state himself.
In face of the massive arrivals of refugees in Europe, and notably the huge recent influx into Germany, France has agreed to accept an extra 24,000 asylum seekers over the next two years. The initial organisation of accommodating the refugees is to be mapped out at a meeting this weekend between the interior minister and French mayors who have volunteered to provide assistance. But, as Feriel Alouti and Michaël Hajdenberg report, the crisis highlights the already thoroughly inadequate previsions for asylum seekers, while tensions, fuelled by some mayors opposed to the scheme, are already brewing among some local populations.
Paris is about to have its first woman mayor in the city's long history. But the certainty that either socialist Anne Hidalgo or right-wing candidate Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet will take the reins of the French capital after the two rounds of local elections that start this Sunday masks the fact that most French towns and cities will be run by a man whichever of the main parties wins the local vote. An examination of the mayoral election candidates by Mediapart has revealed that the great majority are male, white – and not very young. Lénaïg Bredoux and Ellen Salvi report on the slow progress made by the country's two major mainstream parties in making their politicians more representative of the populace.
In a desperate protest to save the public finances of his local administration, the mayor of Sevran, a town of 51,000 inhabitants situated just north-east of Paris, began a hunger strike this weekend outside the French parliament which he has vowed will only end when concrete reforms are made to ease the economic plight of France’s worst-off towns. In this interview with Renaud Ceccotti, he details his demands and explains how, after 11 years of battling with what he calls a "structural" financial shortfall, “we’ve reached the end.”
