After a short week of electronic voting, the last French people to vote on Swiss territory for the first round of the legislative elections will go to the polls this Sunday, June 5, a week before their compatriots living in the country. And the least we can say is that the campaign that led to this vote was not a long quiet Rhone.
First of all, the presidential majority, particularly favorite in Switzerland, sent as candidate Marc Ferracci, the wedding witness of Emmanuel Macron who participated in the development of his program. This 44-year-old economist who teaches at the University of Paris-Panthéon-Assas had no connection with Switzerland. A parachute drop that made waves among the regulars of the “circo”.
In the ranks of local “walkers”, very numerous and mobilized, the appointment raised some questions, but having the president’s ear and listening attentively to such a prestigious candidate seems to have calmed things down.
Then, we learned this week that the Swiss representatives of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s New People’s Ecological and Social Union (Nupes) are tearing each other apart to the point that the deputy of the official candidate now calls not to vote for her. Faced with this controversy which has taken on a national scale, the candidate is absent subscribers.
“We are served, this year, on the riding!”
The previous legislature was already not sad. The elected representative of June 19 will effectively succeed the fanatic specialist in polemics Joachim Son-Forget who, having been elected on the dynamics of Emmanuel Macron’s first election from the Socialist Party, passed during his mandate to the center right group of the UDI. He then supported Éric Zemmour, then left for Ukraine in his personal car in order to“to support the resistance” – before finally returning to represent itself as an independent, Reconquête, the Zemmourian party, having invested in the Vaudois entrepreneur Philippe Tissot.
“We are served this year on the constituency! Things are happening in the microcosm,” commented Guillaume Grosso, the very active Social Democratic candidate of the Radical Left Party, not aligned with Nupes. The man thinks he can take advantage of this confusion in the center and on the left to get out of the game. He would see himself disrupting the announced duel between the presidential favorite and the candidate of the traditional right, Régine Mazloum-Martin.
Basically, however, these episodes worthy of Game of Thrones did not really wake up the campaign. Some even say that it is rather lip service because these controversies prevent igniting for a candidate or a program.
But why is the Swiss constituency so quick to generate scenarios worthy of a boulevard comedy? Do local French people have a particular way of sending their representative to the National Assembly? First of all, we can think that the proximity makes it a particularly valuable destination. After all, the round trips are much simpler than with New York or Sydney. “A beautiful bride”, says an activist.
Against “French-style ultracentralized logic”
The salary of a deputy, approximately 6,000 euros per month, however, slows down certain people working in Switzerland. Not everyone is ready to halve their salary. Guillaume Grosso also underlines the sociological changes of a population which traditionally voted on the right, but whose numbers have exploded in recent years. There are now 175,000 French people registered in Switzerland, making it the largest community of French people abroad.
Attracted by wages and the living environment, they are actually more and more numerous, with increasingly varied profiles.
A moving, atypical electorate, which is perhaps also nurtured by political habits quite far from those we know in France. The Swiss parliamentarist and federalist spirit does not adapt well to parachuting and other ultra-centralized logics à la française.
A militia and liberal vision of politics which could explain profiles who consider themselves freer in their positions, less prone to the discipline of national parties managed very far from home.
Source of the article
Born in March 1998 from the merger of New Daily, from Geneva Journal and some Lausanne Gazette, this centre-right title, popular with executives, presents itself as the benchmark daily newspaper in French-speaking and French-speaking Switzerland.
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