Will she be the next number two of the Socialist Party? “I accepted Olivier Faure’s proposal to become the first national deputy secretary if we have a majority after the vote of the militants,” Johanna Rolland declared this Saturday in the columns of the JDD.
In other words, she will occupy the second position of the current First Secretary of the Socialists, if the latter is renewed in office at the end of the PS Congress scheduled in Marseilles at the end of January.
This 43-year-old woman is known in particular for leading the city of Nantes. She became a city councilor in 2014, succeeding Patrick Rimbert. Former first deputy, the latter had taken over the reins of the city after Jean-Marc Ayrault – mayor of Nantes between 1989 and 2012 – was appointed prime minister by François Hollande.
Anne Hidalgo Campaign Director
Before that, Johanna Rolland had worked alongside the socialist as a parliamentary attaché when he was a deputy for Loire-Atlantique. What followed: a position as a city councilor beginning in 2008, then a 2012 appointment as the first deputy in charge of youth education, large urban projects and city policy.
A rising figure of the PS and re-elected mayor of Nantes in 2020, the former Science-Po Lille became the spokesman for his political formation in 2021 for the presidential elections. Before becoming Anne Hidalgo’s campaign manager.
He formed with Carole Delga, Michael Delafosse or Mathieu Klein -respectively president of the Occitanie region, mayor of Montpellier and mayor of Nancy- a “gang of quadras” as it was understood in le figaro. Or new faces at the head of large communities that are supposed to embody “the left of reality” through their local responsibilities.
The narrative didn’t work. Anne Hidalgo led her party to an even higher berezine than Benoît Hamon’s (6.36%) in 2017, gathering only 1.74% of the vote in the first round of the presidential election.
Booed for her policy to combat insecurity
Today, Johanna Rolland and the mayor of Paris take different paths. The Paris city councilor supports Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol, mayor of Rouen, for the PS congress. The latter wants to embody a third way between that of Hélène Geoffroy, mayoress of Vaulx-en-Velin, fiercely opposed to Nupes, and that of Olivier Faure, favorable to this left-wing alliance.
In it JDD, Johanna Rolland says that she does not “understand” the candidacy of Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol. “We cannot be in favor of the Nupes and against the Nupes at the same time,” she says.
Recently, the mayoress of Nantes was interrupted by the local opposition for her policy to combat insecurity, after the rape of a woman in Nantes on September 24.
“I refuse to give in to this hysteria. The overcoming that we have witnessed in recent days has only one vocation: to instrumentalize an unsustainable human drama,” Johanna Rolland responded in West of France.
Source: BFM TV
