Manuel Valls is a divisive character. We know that the person concerned was looking for a (para)fall point. In 2018, he announced his retirement from French political life to stand for municipal elections in his hometown, Barcelona. Beaten to the hilt (with 13.18% of the vote), Manuel Valls, 59, no longer has any mandate today.

An election in an armchair, you say to yourself, with notoriety (we now speak of “media surface”), an address book and a network like his?

Not so sure because several obstacles stand in his way. Starting with the outgoing Macronist deputy, Stéphane Vojetta, a former investment banker, who arrived in Madrid almost twenty years ago. Alternate to Samantha Cazebonne, he had to succeed her in the middle of her mandate when the interested party had gone to slip in the Senate!

Today, Stéphane Vojetta therefore inherits, with or without his consent, this clientelist system. It is easy for him to cry foul, seeing himself as the legitimate heir to the constituency and announcing a dissident candidacy.

The risk is great then to transform the operation into a fiasco, because two candidates of the presidential majority for the same constituency, there is therefore one too many! Especially since the Union of the Left is raising the stakes around these elections. By considering Renaud Le Berre in Barcelona, ​​the NUPES (New Popular Ecological and Social Alliance) invests a candidate who, as in Madrid, had already united the left at the local level in 2021 during the consular elections. With a convincing result: 43% of votes, against 23% for the list labeled LREM. On the right, it is Laurent Goater, a 53-year-old father, business manager in the private sector, who has been appointed to wear the colors of LR. Elected in Portugal to advise French people abroad, re-elected last year, president of the consular council, he plays the local anchor card to the fullest, but will undoubtedly be penalized by the pitiful score of Valérie Pécresse, the LR candidate in the presidential election last month. Facing them, the Reconquest! by Eric Zemmour chose Nicolas Chamoux. The only female candidate is a regionalist Basque from Bayonne, Garbiñe Eraso, 47, born in Paris but living on the banks of the Nive for more than twenty years. It is presented by the movement “Euskal Herria Bai”, Basque Country yes.