It’s been a while since I’ve written anything about my favorite part of “la France profonde.” (Of course, it’s been a while since I’ve written anything here period.) It snowed some in the Haute-Loire department last night, but was mostly above freezing during the day. Reportedly, it’s been a fairly mild winter.
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| Le Puy in July. © Richard Mounts |
Since Thursday, the major local news story has been Laurent Wauquiez’ decision to seek his party’s nomination as its candidate for presidency of the newly-created region of Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes. The election will be at the end of this year. Besides being a national figure in the center-right UMP (Union pour un Mouvement Populaire) party (and a minister during the Sarkozy government), he is the mayor of Le Puy-en-Velay, a position he’s had since 2008. His announcement had a special importance for Le Puy since he promised that if elected to the regional position he’d resign as mayor.
It seems unlikely he would have announced his candidacy if he didn’t have reasons to believe he could win. And I’ll be interested to see how things develop in this new political landscape and, eventually, what it might mean for environmental policies in the area. But right at the moment the new regional electorate is probably much more diverse than Le Puy’s. For one thing, it includes the major cities of Clermont-Ferrand, Saint-Étienne, Lyon, and Grenoble whose voters probably aren’t so familiar with someone from a small city (stretching it) in the mountains. Wauquiez promises he’ll continue to look out for Le Puy if he’s elected. Somehow, though, I suspect he may to be able to look out for the city from the mayor’s office. We’ll see.
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