Election results alert
The results of the presidential and legislative elections for your locality, as well as political news, directly in your mailbox.
“It was very interesting for us to take this tour almost a week before the first round of the presidential election,” explained Claude Grivel, president of the National Union of Local Development Actors (UNADEL). Elected officials and rural actors made this Thursday “the tour” of the HQs of presidential candidates to listen to their proposals.
“Of the 12 candidates, we met four personally and the teams of six others at a high level”, explained PS senator from Nièvre Patrice Joly. The delegation, made up of elected officials and representatives of associations, was received by Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, Valérie Pécresse, Yannick Jadot and Jean Lassalle, and by the teams of Marine Le Pen, Éric Zemmour, Emmanuel Macron, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Fabien Roussel and Anne Hidalgo. In total, the delegation represents around forty national federations and organizations involved in rurality, they said in a press release.
“Everyone intends to defend rurality and public services, but the candidates sometimes have difficulty explaining concretely how they are going to do it, their proposals not always being precise”, added Claude Grivel. “We had a good listening”, for his part affirmed the mayor of Ceffonds, Éric Krezel, president of the rural mayors of the Haute-Marne department. “Some have an image of rurality in decline, but others have understood that it is a resource,” he observed.
“We also came with a number of proposals concerning our territories and what they need,” added Patrice Joly, also president of the National Association of New Ruralities (ANNR), which leads the French rural parliament. The debates focused in particular on the medical deserts affecting rural areas and other issues such as the closure of public services, but also topics such as “the phenomenon of migratory flows to the countryside following the health crisis”, a he specified.
The rural elected officials, who were very much in demand by the candidates during their search for the 500 sponsorships required to formally run for the presidency of the Republic, took advantage of this day to remind them of their expectations before the first round on April 10. The Rural Parliament calls for “the establishment of a multiannual plan of 10 billion euros, or 2 billion per year, to promote concrete measures in favor of rural territories”.