2023-11-21 08:00:09
It is time to ensure the equality of citizens, democratic clarity and the legitimacy of the mayor in Paris. Three reasons why the mayor of Paris must now be directly elected. If it is true that the mayor is never elected by universal suffrage in France, and that only the municipal council is, which then chooses the councilor from among its members, the method of election of the mayor of Paris is in truth doubly indirect. By voting for a single list with a single ballot, Parisians choose at the same time, and without possible distinction, on the one hand their elected district officials, and, on the other, some members of the Paris Council, those -the same people who will elect the mayor of Paris.
A double filter therefore separates the Parisian voter from his mayor. First of all, it is not very democratic because it can create a situation in which a candidate with a minority vote in the entire city can become a majority in the Council thanks to the election of Paris councilors in the districts. He could thus, as shown by the calculations published by the former deputy Eric Diard in his bill no. 3307, become mayor of Paris by winning only eight districts out of the twenty and 31% of the votes at the scale of the city !
This ballot is unequal because each voter does not individually have the same weight depending on the district in which they live. Instead of looking for a majority of voters, the candidate for mayor of Paris is looking for a majority of advisors. This leads to opportunistic territorial strategies: prioritizing certain districts, those which are major providers of seats on the Council, and abandoning others which elect fewer.
Derogatory mode
It is, consequently, demobilizing, each voice not having the same impact depending on your political opinion and your district. If you vote for a list which loses at the district level, it will not send a number of councilors from Paris proportional to its votes. Your voice, for Paris, will have counted for nothing. A left-wing voter in the 15th arrondissement, or a right-wing one in the 10th, has no interest in getting involved. Nothing justifies the persistence of this exceptional method of election, which only concerns Paris, Lyon and Marseille, and which was thought up by the former Minister of the Interior Gaston Defferre in 1982, with the sole objectives of ensuring a re-election in the Marseille city and to weaken Jacques Chirac in the capital.
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