thirteen people, including two former mayors, tried four years after the events

In 2020, the municipal elections in Marseille were marred by suspicions of false proxies.

At the Marseille judicial court, the trial of the false proxies that tainted the municipal elections in the city in 2020 opens on Monday, September 23 and will last for one week. Thirteen defendants are on trial, including two former district mayors of the Les Républicains party in Marseille, as well as activists, running mates, a police commander and a nursing home director. Because of the 194 fraudulent proxies made, around fifty came from a retirement home, where people, some of whom suffered from Alzheimer’s, resided.

There was an influx of suspicious proxies, recalls Cécile Vignes. In the first round of the municipal elections, she was an assessor in polling station 1203 in Marseille. She recalls on franceinfo: “Little by little, we saw people arriving who presented proxies without, visibly, knowing for whom they were going to vote since they were looking either in their bag or on their mobile phone to give us the name of the person for whom they were voting.”she says.

“And we noticed that one address came up regularly: a retirement home where I know people suffer from degenerative diseases, Alzheimer’s or other…”

Cécile, assessor of a Marseille polling station

to franceinfo

Residents who were therefore not able to give their powers of attorney. They are among the 200 victims identified, of what investigators have described as “hunting” to fraudulent powers of attorney. Powers of attorney validated thanks to the complicity of a police commander.

The former LR mayors of the sectors concerned by these maneuvers, Julien Ravier in the 11th and 12th arrondissements of Marseille and Yves Moraine in the 6th and 8th, dispute the facts. The latter, running mate in 2020 of Martine Vassal, the current president of the metropolis, simply acknowledged to investigators a policy “aggressive” proxy collection.

This is not the only case that will have disrupted the municipal elections in Marseille in 2020, since another trial will open in October, for false proxies with this time on the defendants’ bench, two municipal councilors of the victorious left-wing coalition.