the essential
The record of 38 candidates for the European elections gave a hard time to the mayors of the communes and towns of Lot, forced to invest in electoral signs, often empty.
Gindou, Carayac, or even Gourdon… The list of mayors unhappy at having had to invest in 38 panels for the European election campaign is far from exhaustive. Small or large municipality, the observation remains the same. “It’s unacceptable,” exclaims Léa Guerrieri, mayor of Carayac, a town of around a hundred inhabitants.
Purchase or recycling, everyone has their own method
“Thirty-eight candidates is unheard of,” notes Jean-Marc Vayssouze, president of the association of mayors and elected officials of Lot (AMF46). A record of lists, displays and therefore equipment to install. “Thirty-eight panels to put in place, it’s complex and it has a cost,” indicates the president of the AMF46. “It took two of my municipal agents four and a half days to install everything,” says Jean-Marie Courtin, mayor of the town of Gourdon. With its eight polling stations, this arrangement took them both time and money. “In total we paid 700 euros for the displays at the eight polling stations. Fortunately, we were able to divide some panels that we already had in two, which helped limit costs,” he adds, exasperated. Faced with regulations which require an identical surface area for each candidate in order to respect fairness, mayors and municipal councilors have had to “show imagination”. Jean-Marc Vayssouze indicates: “Some have even recycled tables to make panels. » Elsewhere still, municipal employees urgently manufactured wooden panels of regulatory dimensions, without the certainty of being able to reuse them.
Thirty-eight panels for few posters
A lot of investment for… few results: “I walked past the displays this morning. 72 hours before the elections, there are some that are still empty,” laments the mayor of Gourdon. The testimonies follow one another and… are similar. Mireille Figeac, mayor of the town of Gindou, testifies in an annoyed tone: “We are spending for nothing. There are barely a dozen posters on the panels. » In Carayac, Léa Guerrieri hardly counts any more. “I find it unacceptable that we invest in 38 panels for 14 displays,” she exclaims. For the woman who is also secretary of the town hall of Frontenac, the annoyance is twofold: “In Frontenac, there is only one poster out of the thirty-eight panels! Only one ! »
Mayors speak with common sense
“We have solutions. The first to arrive sticks up their poster and the others add as they go,” says Mireille Figeac. Simple and efficient. For the mayor of Gourdon, Jean-Marie Courtin, the idea is completely different. He proposes the implementation of a sponsorship system on the same principle as that of the presidential elections. “It would limit the number of candidates and it would give more credibility to the elections,” he explains. An opinion shared by Jean-Marc Vayssouze: “With 38 applications, we are not promoting democracy, exchange and transparency. For Europe, which needs to strengthen its credibility, that doesn’t help anything. » Regardless, everyone agrees that they would have done well without all this “useless” investment.
