The Angers municipal elections in Le Monde

Les élections municipales d'Angers ont été récemment l'objet de deux couvertures du quotidien national Le Monde les 19 et 20 mars. La ville est considérée comme l'une de celles où le pouvoir pourrait changer de camp. Les deux articles montrent qu'en dépit de ce qui est dit par nombre d'électeurs les considérations nationales influenceront leur décision. Ils confirment également que l'enjeu n'est pas que politique. Après la disparition successive de Technicolor et des Ardoisières d'Angers, nombre d'électeurs pensent que l'emploi doit gagner.

Angers has recently been on the sunlights of the daily newspaper, Le Monde, a reference in the French medias landscape. Two articles,one about the end of the slate mining in Trélazé, an Angers neighbouring city, another about the attitude of three young inhabitants a fews days before the municipal elections, depict a city through the vision of a national observer.


The city looks to face, with the closure of Les Ardoisières d'Angers, one of the oldest companies of the region, bad economic conditions given, one year before reminds Le Monde, another flag company, Technicolor, also disappeared. The end of Les Ardoisières, on November 2013, "has been widely

denounced", writes the newspaper, what implicitely suggests that Angers representatives were rather powerless. The title also points out that in Angers the disappointment caused by the policies of the right then left governments is something which will be included in the decision making of the voters. Moreover, with a local unemployment rate above the national level, the main worry of former Ardoisières employees is not the color of the future Angers town council but their prospects to find a new job.

Twenty four hours later, Le Monde dedicated a second coverage to Angers through interviewes of three young inhabitants. After the daily points out Angers is one of the fifty towns where the power could pass from left to right, the coverage shows that "change in power is necessary" even if the persons have no critics against the current majority and the outgoing mayor but "the city needs alternating after a forty years period on the same model", say two of the three witnesses. There also, the national context is important in the thoughts of voters even if, at the same time, the questioned persons consider it is necessary to go beyond the split between left and right.