Back with Sandrine Etoa-Andegue on the significant events of the year. And it is those who have experienced them who tell them. Jean-Yves Rolland, the mayor of Callac, in the Côtes-d’Armor, recounts the tense situation in this small rural town at the heart of the news.
January 11, 2023. Under pressure, the mayor of Callac Jean-Yves Rolland throws in the towel. His town in central Brittany will not welcome the few dozen refugees, as provided for in a project called Horizon. The program, devised in partnership with the Mercy endowment fund, was, he said, to revitalize this rural town with an aging population. If he says “to regret“the abandonment of the project presented in the spring of 2022 to the Caillacois, the elected official explainsto be found in an impasse facing a city council that was in danger of cracking.
>> Reception of refugees in Callac: the foundation behind the abandoned project files a complaint for “incitement to hatred”
I have to say that the situation had become explosive in the village between the demonstrations (September 17 and November 5, 2022) of a small group of local opponents rallied by militants of Reconquête, the party of Eric Zemmour with sometimes, says the mayor, Nazi flags on the square of Callac and the counter-demonstrations of support for the project and denunciation of the extreme right.
“If you don’t intervene, we’re leaving”
The mayor is then harassed and threatened with death; the prefecture had even advised him at one time to blur the windows of his office at the town hall so as not to be targeted by sniper fire. The tensions also reach the heart of the municipal council. In June, the mayor withdrew his delegation to his third deputy Laure-Line Inderbitzin, who had qualified “unforgivable mistakethe abandonment of the project.
Jean-Yves Rolland today comments on this decision, which he had explained in a simple press release until then, stating that the choice to give up on the Horizon project “was done because we had made a collective decision to put an end to it. And then, overnight, she goes to Paris on a show with Mediapart (May 10) in which she announces: ‘The mayor has thrown in the towel. It is an unforgivable mistake. And the next day, she goes even further, saying ‘If the house of the mayor of Saint-Brevin burned down, it’s because we stopped the Horizon project’. So I consider that going to brutally oppose the mayor in this way is to set up a wall between us.“
He believes that this dismissal is “a strong signal sent. But maybe it’s a bad signal for some“and also said”regret having had to make that decision“. But, he adds “I think that if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have been in front of you today, my colleagues were resigning. Anyway, they had warned me: ‘if you don’t intervene. We are leaving‘”.
The municipal team still under pressure
A few months after the Horizon project was abandoned, tensions subsided. Jean-Yves Rolland describes a more peaceful atmosphere“we find the smile of the population, there is a spirit of protest that has remained there, but which concerns a small number of people.“
“There are wounds that have remained and the ‘anti’ committee is always there, always on our backs permanently”
Jean-Yves Rollandat franceinfo
The local committee of opponents continues to “put pressure,” on the municipal team, “IThey go over all the folders, every day. They are telling us, you won’t do anything without a referendum, without our opinion. That’s new. It wasn’t the case before.”
The municipal team, including the mayor, were the target of threats, harassment and intimidation. On the judicial level, several complaints have been filed and the examination of the files is in progress, specifies the mayor, “but it’s not easy because these are complaints that concern social networks and it’s not easy to trace the authors, unlike anonymous letters“. Jean-Yves Rolland describes dhe letters of great violence: “‘You’re going to die collaborator, dirty Zionist, I hope your wife will be raped, your children sodomized’… Everything that is not understandable. We are not prepared for that in the life of an elected official, especially in our countryside. Callac is a small town of 2,300 inhabitants. I was a farmer, I never experienced situations like that. It shocks us and it still shakes us.“
“Terror had set in”
The flood of threats has dried up towards the mayor, but not towards certain elected officials according to Jean-Yves Rolland who wonders, “with these levels crossed by a fringe of the far right, the question is ‘Will there still be candidates in all the municipalities in the next municipal election?’ It’s not sure.“He himself does not know at present whether he will run again.
The abandonment of the project remains for him “a painful failure“: “Pfor me, it was a nice projecthe continues, but badly advertised, certainly badly prepared by us and by the ‘Merci’ endowment fund, because it was their first project too. And the far right won, so they say. I prefer to say that they scored points.”
“If we had not given up, they would have won because we would have fallen and the far right would have taken over the leadership of the town.”
Jean-Yves Rollandat franceinfo
Jean-Yves Rolland assures us that Callac is and will remain a welcoming town for refugees and exiles. He admits that “terror settled because the inhabitants of Callac, for the majority, are people of a certain age. And so, when they saw all these demonstrations, it scared them. But foreigners are always welcome, there is the state project to settle refugees in the countryside. Until 2022, there were five families here; in February and March 2023, there were two new families, a Syrian, a Sudanese who arrived, sixteen new refugees and there was not a problem, not a sound. Things are going very well in the field and they are well supported by local associations, well supported at school for the children“.
After the State announced several series of measures to better protect elected officials, Jean-Yves Rolland believes that “it’s not the height of the problem, but it’s already a first step“.