The brutal death this Sunday of Patrick Devedjian upset the political class. President of the Hauts-de-Seine Departmental Council, former minister, he was the best known of an already long list of local elected officials who are sick or have also succumbed to the coronavirus.
Sunday passed away Daniel Davisse, Vice communist president of the Val-de-Marne departmental council, honorary mayor of Choisy-le-Roy who, according to the current mayor, Didier Guillaume, "worked for 18 years" and "left a trace indelible in the city ”.
The day before, Jean-Charles Nègre, Communist vice-president of the department of Seine-Saint-Denis who had been elected councilor in the first round of municipal elections in Montreuil, was also a victim of Covid 19. Patrick Bessac, mayor of the commune, said his deep emotion to his constituents: "he was a friend, a landmark, a beacon in the storm, comforting and considerate". He had just been re-elected in the first round .
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Jacques Lajeanne, mayor of a commune of 130 inhabitants located not far from Morvan, 82 years old, or François Lantz, 74 years old, mayor of the village of Saint-Nabor in the Bas-Rhin, also died after contracting the virus.
Campaign candidates, they shook hands
Never seen. In the Seine-Saint-Denis department alone, three mayors are hospitalized: François Asensi, mayor of Tremblay-en-France, Stéphane Blanchet, elected member of Sevran, and Hervé Chevreau, mayor of Épinay-sur-Seine.
In Drancy, two municipal councilors, Paule Beaujour, 81, and Brahim Fellah, 53, died. Both of them in poor health, they were very involved in the campaign. Destabilized and worried, Aude Lagarde, the mayor, whose chief of staff and a good part of the staff are also contaminated, thinks of the ecumenical meditation ceremony which she will organize after "because one was Catholic and the other Muslim" . Donations are pouring into town hall to pay tribute to them.
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The list is also long of those who manage their commune from a hospital bed like Patrick Devedjian who still managed his department until the end of last week.
Régis Pinot, the father of cyclist Thibaut Pinot, elected from Mélisey, in Haute-Saône, evokes in the Republican East , "strong respiratory problems" and confides how "stressful" it is to be tested positive. While in Muzillac, in Morbihan, Jo Brohan, the outgoing mayor, who did not stand for re-election, was hospitalized urgently.
"Elected officials in a row"
Best news, however, in Fontenay-aux-Roses (Hauts-de-Seine) where the mayor, Laurent Vastel, wrote to his constituents to say that he was better. Even if the doctors remain vigilant about his state of health. His first assistant is also hospitalized. Several other elected members of the majority and of the opposition are also affected.
But why are these elected officials paying such a heavy price for the coronavirus? Candidates in the campaign, they have multiplied contacts in recent weeks, handshakes, hugs, they have badly or not protected themselves. They mainly organized the first round of municipal elections.
And, since the start of containment, almost 15 days ago, they are the only elected officials that the citizens can call out, to whom they can ask for help, hold on, hope, ask for the impossible and say their anxieties. They try to manage the isolation of the elders, to enforce barrier gestures on the markets until the latter closes, to ensure security ...
Crisis managers at the local level, they are, as Gérard Larcher, the President of the Senate likes to remind us, "in a row" and cannot stay at home . Because in a period of confinement, there is no shortage of bloodshed, tumultuous encounters and shouting. On the forehead, weakened, they meet many people and bear the brunt of the morbid and erratic circulation of the virus.
