This has been a week of campaigning across France for Sunday's second round of municipal elections, but not in Perpignan, where the first round saw far-right mayor Louis Aliot win a reelection with 50.61% of the vote. He swept the board after absorbing a segment of the traditional right wing, even with the public support of former mayor Jean-Marc Pujol, his long-time rival who lost in the 2020 elections and who had presided over the city council for eleven years. In February 2020, he received former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont with full honors before holding his massive rally of 100,000 people in Perpignan to show solidarity with the exiled leader, after his municipal government had already supported those facing repression on several occasions. Pujol is a conservative from the Republicans party, which governed in coalition with the Catalan nationalist party Unitat Catalana, but now considers Aliot to represent "the right."