Senator Stéphane Ravier leaves Reconquête! and calls for a union of the right for the municipal elections in Marseille

Bouches-du-Rhône senator Stéphane Ravier announced on Monday, September 2, that he was leaving the far-right party Reconquête! in an interview with BFM Marseille Provence. He will now sit under the banner of his movement, “Marseille first”, he explained, claiming to no longer belong “to no national movement”.

He also said he aspired to a union of the right in view of the municipal elections in Marseille: “I call on all people of good will to remember that in 2020, if the city fell into the hands of the left and the far left, it was because the right was divided, because the left was in the minority.”.

“I extend my hand to the National Rally, to those who identify with right-wing politics”added the senator, who was the RN candidate for the 2020 municipal elections, but left in 2022 to join Eric Zemmour’s party for the presidential election.

Union of the Right

The RN began this union of the right with an alliance with the Ciottists of the Republicans for the last legislative elections, which led to the election of Olivier Fayssat for example as deputy of Marseille.

The battle for the town hall has already begun in Marseille on the right. On Friday evening, the right and the presidential party displayed their unity, also not hiding their plans to reconquer the city. Marseille’s shift to a left-Green-civil society coalition was a thunderbolt in the 2020 municipal elections, after twenty-five years in office of Jean-Claude Gaudin, the tutelary figure of the local right.

On the left, the question will be whether the outgoing mayor, Benoît Payan, who was appointed following the resignation of environmentalist Michèle Rubirola, will go back into the campaign or not. And whether he will benefit from a left-wing union or not, and whether this union will this time include La France Insoumise, currently absent from the municipal majority.

Stéphane Ravier’s conviction for illegal taking of interests could also hamper his ambitions for the next municipal elections. The Marseille Criminal Court sentenced him on Wednesday, May 29, to a six-month suspended prison sentence and one year of ineligibility, punishing his multiple interventions at the highest level of Marseille city hall to have his son, Thomas Ravier, hired in August 2015 as a temporary worker in the green spaces department of the 7th arrondissement city hall.^e sector, of which he was at the time the mayor.