Macronist Camille Galliard-Minier elected MP against Lyes Louffok (NFP)

Camille Galliard-Minier was elected deputy this Sunday, during the second round of the legislative by-election in the first constituency of Isère. The candidate from the presidential camp beat Lyes Louffok (LFI) in a vote where abstention broke records.

Camille Galliard-Minier was elected deputy for Isère in the second round of the legislative by-election this Sunday, January 19 with 64.28% of the votes, according to the complete results of all the municipalities in the first constituency.

The candidate Ensemble pour la République, former deputy of Olivier Véran, received 20,171 votes. She thus snatches the seat from the left during a ballot that resembles “return match”. His competitor Lyes Louffok (La France insoumise / New Popular Front) obtained 11,211 votes or 35.72% of the vote.

“This is the result of three months of an intense campaign”welcomed the new MP during a first speech from her campaign HQ. “Doing politics means giving yourself to others, but it also means giving messages. That’s what we tried to convey and I think we succeeded: having a positive message”she declared, addressing her supporters, promising to “represent all the inhabitants of this constituency”.

Lyes Louffok, for his part, acknowledged his defeat in a press release while promising that “this path does not end here.” “I knew this battle would be tough. But I accepted it, because it offered me a platform to talk about what really matters: the rights of children. (…) And if I did not win this election, I am proud to have contributed to these subjects finding their place at the heart of the political debate”he writes.

This election was organized after the resignation of Insoumis Hugo Prevost last October, accused of sexist and sexual violence. Among the eleven candidates competing in the first round, Lyes Louffok came first on January 12, ahead of Camille Galliard-Minier by 529 votes.

The NFP candidate won the first round thanks only to the city of Grenoble which changed the result at the very end of the evening. But Lyes Louffok was left behind, during the two rounds, in most of the dozen or so small, well-off communities in the constituency and did not have a reserve of votes, unlike his competitor.

The candidate Renaissance, MP between 2020 and 2022 when Olivier Véran was Minister of Health, for her part obtained her best scores in Grésivaudan. In the second round, she even followed her rival in the polls in Grenoble – which traditionally votes on the left – where she accumulated only 30 votes less.

Camille Galliard-Minier was also able to count on the voters of her rival Les Républicains Nathalie Béranger (16.8% in the first round), Hervé Gerbi (7.71%), candidate of the “bloc central”and Ciottist Alexandre Lacroix (11.1%) who all called to vote for her.

Camille Galliard-Minier, a 49-year-old ex-lawyer, thus obtains more than 12 000 additional votes between the first and second rounds of this election. A much more favorable dynamic than that of Lyes Louffok. The children's rights activist wins some 2 700 votes, widening a gap of almost 9 000 votes in favor of the Macronist candidate for this second round.

The level of abstention, however, reached records during this by-election. While 35.86% of voters went to the polls during the first round, the participation rate reached 38.25% this Sunday, a very slight increase. Low mobilization expected for a limited-stakes election.

“The elections of last July reminded us that holidays were not an obstacle to relatively high participation if the power issue is important. This is firstly because the power issue is very low, with a minimum media coverage, participation will be low”explained Florent Gougou, lecturer at the Grenoble Institute of Political Studies.

To mobilize voters, many national political figures traveled to Grenoble between the two rounds. Among them, former Prime Minister Gabriel Attal came to support Camille Galliard-Minier twice.

Lyes Louffok, who failed in his first candidacy for the last legislative elections in Val-de-Marne, frequently found himself the target of accusations of “parachuting”. But Insoumis received numerous visits of support from elected officials, most of them close to LFI, but also from environmentalists Cyrielle Chatelain and Marine Tondelier, and from socialist senator Laurence Rossignol.

Camille Galliard-Minier, who was born and resides in this constituency, presents herself as a “social democrat” and often highlighted his local roots to achieve what his team presented as a “return match” against LFI after the early legislative elections of June/July 2024.

Invited on the set of France 3 Alpes, the former lawyer defended a series of proposals to improve access to care. “We must ensure better access to health and go further than Ségur de la Santé. The hospital's collaboration with community medicine and SOS Médecins must be strengthened, and we must have private doctors who can have more patients, with medical assistants.“, she argued.

When she replaced Olivier Véran in the National Assembly, appointed to the government from 2020 to 2022, Camille Galliard-Minier was notably a member of the special commission responsible for examining the bill relating to bioethics and of the group of end-of-life studies.