After Renaud Muselier, another figure in Marseille political life is launching his local micro party this Friday. Yesterday Marseilles framework of the National Rally, Stéphane Ravier is indeed organizing an evening to launch his movement “Marseille first”, as if to lay the beginnings of a race for municipal elections in which the senator is already embarking. One more time. But a small detail has changed, he who has already run for mayor of the second in France three times. At each attempt, this close friend of Marion Maréchal Le Pen had tried to access the supreme function under the colors of the National Rally. But shortly before the presidential elections, the senator, a Marseilles figure in the party, slammed the door of the movement with losses and a crash, to join the ranks of Eric Zemmour.
A few months later, Stéphane Ravier finds himself the only Marseilles and even French parliamentarian under the colors of the polemicist, who failed in the first round in the presidential and legislative elections. So, after announcing the launch of this party upon his resignation from the RN, Stéphane Ravier recently filed the statutes of his movement, at the beginning of the summer. “It is in the perspective of the municipal elections, to avoid the catastrophe of 2020, where the left, a minority, has become the majority by joining forces, confirms the senator. I will thus be more coherent, freer in my movements and my proposals, even if Reconquest! is a much less vertical movement than the RN. The goal is to collect the lines, whatever card we have. Come to Marseille first as you come to McDonald’s: as you are. »
“The LR or RN label will not be enough to be elected”
The creation of this political party is done while the once powerful LR federation of Bouches-du-Rhône has turned into a veritable field of ruins. The president of the department Martine Vassal, like the president of the Paca region, Renaud Muselier, two historic executives of the local right, have both recently rallied Emmanuel Macron. “Leaders who have given up, for personal careers, activists and voters”, recently accused Stéphane Ravier on Instagram, who intends to recover this electorate… and thereby expand his base. “It is not enough to be green, communist, LFI or socialist to win, continues the senator. The LR or RN label will not suffice to be elected. For the Marseillais, I am not a Reconquest! or an ex-LR. I am someone who moves, and who intervenes when called. For municipal elections, we vote more for a candidate than for a label. If Gaudin was re-elected in 2014, it is above all for his person…”
“We are witnessing a kind of convergence between the national right and certain fringes of the republican right, analyzes Lionel Royer-Perreaut, Macronist deputy from Marseille after a long career at LR, and who does not hide his ambitions either. the next municipal ones. Mr. Ravier is trying to capture this fundamental movement locally, in Marseille. Recently, to replace me at the head of the town hall of the 9th and 10th arrondissement, three elected officials from Reconquête voted for the candidate supported by the LRs… He is also trying to have a financial cushion to prepare an electoral campaign, four years before. It is a tool at the service of an ambition. “And to tackle:” But the addition of minorities does not make a majority. I do not believe that Stéphane Ravier has a political future with this strategy, because he lacks the third pillar of the right, which is the RN. You know, in politics, we tend to overestimate what we really represent. »
The hatchet does not seem ready to be buried between Stéphane Ravier and his former allies in the Marseille RN. “By mutual agreement, on both sides, no one is asking for a dialogue after this betrayal, plagues the deputy Franck Allisio and leader of the RN federation of Bouches-du-Rhône. So the creation of this party is a non-event. It’s not a launch, but a re-launch, since he’s announced it to us three times. When you throw something three times, it doesn’t take. Stéphane Ravier rallies strictly no one. I even have people who had left coming back. This is where it happens, let’s be honest. We doubled the number of members in two months. “In the last legislative elections, a brown wave swept over the Bouches-du-Rhône, sending eight deputies to the National Assembly, including a Marseillaise… elected on the historic electoral lands of Stéphane Ravier.