The senator for Bouches-du-Rhône, Stéphane Ravier, announced on Monday 2 September that he was leaving the far-right party Reconquête! in an interview with BFM Marseille Provence. He will now sit under the banner of his movement, “Marseille first”, He explained, stating that he no longer belongs “no national movement”.
He also said that he was aiming for a right-wing union in view of the municipal elections in Marseille: «I call on all those of good will to remember that in 2020, if the city fell into the hands of the left and the far left, it was because the right was divided, because the left was in the minority.».
“I extend my hand to the National Group, to those who identify with right-wing politics”added the senator, who was an RN candidate for the 2020 municipal elections but left in 2022 to join Eric Zemmour’s party for the presidential elections.
Canoness
The RN initiated this right-wing alliance with the Republican cyotists in the last legislative elections, which led to the election of Olivier Fayssat, for example, as a deputy for Marseille.
The battle for the town hall is already underway on the right in Marseille. On Friday evening, the right and the presidential party showed their unity, without hiding their plan to reconquer the city. Marseille’s shift towards a coalition of the left, the Greens and civil society was a lightning bolt in the 2020 municipal elections, after twenty-five years in office by Jean-Claude Gaudin, the tutelary figure of the local right.
On the left, the question will be whether the outgoing mayor, Benoît Payan, appointed after the resignation of the environmentalist Michèle Rubirola, will return to campaigning or not. And whether he will benefit or not from a left-wing unity, and whether this unity will this time include La France Insoumise, currently absent from the municipal majority.
Stéphane Ravier’s conviction for illegal acquisition of interests could also hamper his ambitions for the next municipal elections. The Marseille criminal court sentenced him on Wednesday 29 May to six months’ suspended prison and one year’s disqualification, sanctioning his multiple interventions at the highest level of the Marseille city council to hire, in August 2015, his son, Thomas Ravier, as a temporary worker in the green spaces department of the 7th city council.my sector, of which he was mayor at the time.
