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22/05/2009Perpignan: Healthy Democracy or Banana Republic?

Lives & Livelihood 19: Basil Howitt offers the first of two updates on Perpignan’s surreal smelly socks election saga that began a year ago last March.

Lives and Livelihoods in the Languedoc-Roussillon 24

Following a final ruling by the Conseil d’Etat (France’s highest court of appeal), the mayor, Jean-Paul Alduy (UMP), and the entire Conseil Municipal have been deposed on the grounds of electoral fraud. Pending repeat elections in late June, the town is being governed by Les Sept Sages (“The Seven Wise Men”).

"Let us hope that the people of Perpignan will make the right choice. And especially that they don’t forget to tell the presidents of the electoral wards to turn up with bare feet and sown-up pockets."
(blogger pintro66, 24th April)

"I will choose the best way of helping Perpignan in order that the town doesn’t fall into the hands of that infernal couple Bourquin/Amiel-Donat."
(Jean-Paul Alduy, 24 April)

"Jean-Paul Alduy reasons like a goldfish that turns round and round in his bowl until he becomes an idiot."
(Jacqueline Amiel-Donat, Head of Liste, Socialist Party and New Union with the Left, 28th April)

"You (Alduy) are the shame of our Department."
(blogger Yaaz, 24 April)

"THE ALDUYS HAVE DONE AND STILL DO A LOT FOR US… WE WILL VOTE FOR HIM."
(blogger “fidèle, uprooted Algerian”, 4th May)

"Living for more than 20 years far from my home town, but still Catalan to the core, I contemplate from afar the microcosm that is Perpignan and its sad political theatre worthy of a town in a banana republic."
(blogger JLLBVS, 24th April)

When does a politician’s determination to hold on to power become obstinacy? When does that obstinacy become sheer bloody-mindedness or stupidity? When does the refusal to relinquish power become self-destructive? When does a vision become a delusion?

It all depends where you’re coming from of course. Next month, Perpignan’s citizens will have the chance to reveal how they view the decision of their recently deposed mayor, Jean-Paul Alduy, to stand for re-election. Yet again! This will be his fifth time of standing in an unbroken mayoralty of 16 years.

Before that, his late father Paul Alduy had reigned without interruption for 34 years, since 1959. Hence the loathing among their opponents of the 50-year stranglehold on Perpignan of the Alduy “dynasty”. A loathing that may be understandable, though a credible and cohesive opposition to it still seems as far away as ever.

Neither political side can claim the moral high ground. As recently as last January, the Court of Appeal in Aix-en-Provence sentenced Alduy’s deadly enemy Christian Bourquin, Socialist President of the Conseil Général, to a suspended 3 month prison sentence and a 5,000 euros fine for understating and falsifying his election campaign expenses in 2001. (Another appeal is pending.)


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