The pressure was too much.
In a press release sent to AFP on Wednesday, Jérôme Peyrat (LREM) announced the withdrawal of his candidacy for the legislative elections in the fourth constituency of Dordogne.
Sentenced in 2020 for domestic violence on his former partner – having resulted in 14 days of ITT – the mayor of La Roque-Gageac had been under fire from opposition critics for several days.
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So much so that the situation pushed Stanislas Guerini to blame: the boss of LREM saw fit, to defend him, to launch into an extremely clumsy plea live on the radio.
"
He's an honest man, I don't think he's capable of violence against women
," he explained in the morning.
A sequence immediately relayed by the detractors of the presidential majority, who judged it to be totally out of step with Emmanuel Macron's promise to remake gender equality the "
great cause
" of the five-year term.
Right-wing defector, he left the Élysée after the opening of the investigation
“
I measure that the comments I made this morning on France Info (…).
were able to hit and hurt
”, ended up conceding Stanislas Guerini, at the end of the afternoon on Twitter.
And to add, "
to leave no room for ambiguity (...) (to have) exchanged with Jérôme Peyrat
" so that he withdraws his candidacy for the legislative elections.
Elected continuously for more than 25 years in his stronghold of the Southwest - of which he is still mayor today - Jérôme Peyrat is a defector from the right.
Former adviser to Jacques Chirac then Nicolas Sarkozy, the almost sixty-year-old had joined Emmanuel Macron's political pole between May 2019 and January 2020. He then left the Élysée "out
of respect for the presidential institution
" after the opening of a preliminary investigation.
Precisely the one that led to his conviction nine months later.