Is Gaël Perdriau in the hot seat? The LR mayor of Saint-Étienne and president of the Saint-Etienne metropolis faced new calls to resign on Thursday, September 29 in connection with the case of political blackmail on intimate video which has shaken his city for a month. Monday, during a stormy municipal council, he had proclaimed his innocence: “This story aims to destroy me”he said, defending his legitimacy on behalf of “the presumption of innocence”.
>> INFO FRANCEINFO. Saint-Étienne: Mayor Gaël Perdriau suspected of favoritism
Thursday, the elected representative of Saint-Etienne, absent, had delegated the presidency of the session to 1st vice-president LR Hervé Reynaud. Several elected metropolitan officials, on the left and on the right, criticized his decision for not having completely withdrawn as the majority of the 53 mayors of the inter-municipal structure had, according to them, expressed the wish during a meeting in mid-September.
“Gaël Perdriau is in the minority”
“Gaël Perdriau has lost our confidence, he is in the minority, he has lost his honor and must step back by resigning, even if it means coming back later”said Gérard Tardy, DVD mayor of Lorette. “Years of work were destroyed in a snap of the fingers. (…) The only solution is for the president to resign so that we can move forward serenely”added Éric Berlivet, the mayor of Roche-la-Molière, local representative of the Horizons movement.
“We do not want a formal withdrawal (…) but a real withdrawal.”
Olivier Longeon, elected local ecologistduring a metropolitan council
“This affair concerns us all, it dirties us all”fumed Pierrick Courbon, the leader of the left-wing opposition, evoking “hundreds of national and international articles that describe our territory as the capital of spooks”.
The city of 175,000 inhabitants has been agitated since the end of August by the existence of an intimate video shot in 2015 which prompted a complaint for blackmail from the former centrist first deputy Gilles Artigues, absent from the debates on Monday and Thursday “on the advice of his doctor”, according to his political friends. The scandal prompted Gaël Perdriau to dismiss his chief of staff while one of his assistants, namely accused of having shot the video to politically neutralize Gilles Artigues, submitted his resignation.