Sunday, November 2, 2008

A local representative...

An amazing story in recent days has been of an expat Brit who is a councillor in his local town in southeastern Spain. Perhaps no mean achievement for an expat, especially as it seems that his Spanish is not completely fluent. However, more significantly it was reported that, following the arrest of some of some of his council colleagues in connection with charges of alleged bribery, he actually became the town mayor by default!

A wonderful story, although it was later reported by the BBC that he had not actually been offered the post of mayor which was later taken up again by the released incumbent... a bit of an anti-climax for the story but what was fascinating to hear was that this small town has a population of about 11,000 of which the majority are British - now that is certainly an expat community!

This lead me to thinking of what reaction we would find here if we chose to stand as councillors. In fact, with a long history of British expats in many areas of France, it is not so unusual to hear of the odd Brit on a local council. However, in the hills of a rural area of the South of France we are in an environment where visitors from neighbouring villages can often be thought of as strangers and true foreigners are still regarded as something of a novelty... and with Brits representing about half of one percent of the population in our village, our situation is rather different to that expat enclave in Spain. Perhaps for now we should just support the most expat-friendly local candidates to represent our modest needs...

No comments: