Clotilde Armand

Clotilde Marie Brigitte Armand (born 28 June 1973) is a French-Romanian businesswoman and politician currently serving as councillor in Bucharest's Sector 1. In the Romanian local elections, 2016, she ran for Mayor of Bucharest's Sector 1 from Save Bucharest Union (SBU), losing to the Social Democratic candidate.

Clotilde Marie Brigitte Armand was born in Pointe-à-Pitre, where her father was undergoing military service and taught mathematics to Guadeloupean children. Her family was from Vichy, where she also attended primary and secondary school. She studied at the École Centrale Paris and then the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she met her future husband, Sergiu Moroianu, a Romanian mathematics researcher. She married Moroianu in 1997 and moved to Bucharest in 1999, but the following years, she lived in France and Germany, before moving back to Bucharest.

In 2002, she worked for Airbus in France and Germany, heading the A380 team, being the head of a thousand engineers and having a budget of a billion euro. In 2005, she became the head of the Romanian branch of gas distribution company GDF Suez. Since September 2013, Armand has been heading the Romanian and Bulgarian branches of French engineering company Egis.

Armand was accused that she profited from the contract between the Romanian state and Bechtel Corporation; she responded that she became the director of the company only after the contract with Bechtel ended (in March 2013) and that Egis only verified the quality of the works of Bechtel, therefore, she argued, the company defended the interests of Romania. She also accused the Bechtel Corporation of treating Romania like a vassal, the contract being "effectively a tribute paid in the virtue of a treaty of vassalage".

She acquired the Romanian citizenship in 2015.

2016 local elections

Nicușor Dan, a political activist was a friend of Armand's husband, founded a new party called Save Bucharest Union. Armand was chosen by the party to be their mayoral candidate for Bucharest's Sector 1 and began organizing her campaign only six weeks before the deadline. Her campaign was based on anti-corruption and against politics as usual, arguing that "the political class has been separated from the true will of the people".

She promised better management of public services, following the urban design model of Paris (replacing the car-centered model with a public transport model) and building an esplanade surrounding the lakes in the northern part of the sector.

Although exit polls and early results indicated she was the winner, the final results showed that she lost to Social Democratic Party's Dan Tudorache, who received 23,220 votes (31,07%), while Armand received only 21,504 votes (28,77%).

Nicușor Dan, the president of SBU noted some statistical discrepancies: in the precincts where the party had observers, Armand won by a slim margin, whereas in the precincts where it did not have observers, Armand lost. Also, the number of canceled votes was substantially higher in those precincts and there were discrepancies between the number of ballots given to each precinct and returned. A member of the Electoral Bureau told the press that the reason of the discrepancies was that electoral precinct presidents were "idiots" who filled in wrongly the forms.

While not accusing anyone of vote fraud, Armand asked for a recount in 18 precincts. The Sector 1 Electoral Constituency Bureau refused the recount, arguing that the "lack of diligence" of her party (for not being represented in all precincts) was not the fault of the Electoral Bureau. Around 500 supporters of Armand organized a protest in University Square, demanding a recount.

Armand had also sent an objection of unconstitutionality, arguing that the plurality voting system is flawed because in her the mayor was elected by only 10% of the constituents. The objection has been accepted and forwarded to the Constitutional Court.

She was on both the Save Bucharest Union's lists for the Bucharest and Sector 1 councillors and, after the elections, she chose to be a Sector 1 councillor.

Clotilde Armand argues that Romania needs a change of the political class. She wrote an open letter to President Klaus Iohannis in which she asked the two main parties of Romania (the Social Democratic Party and the National Liberal Party, both of which have roots in the National Salvation Front) to apologize for their involvement in the June 1990 Mineriad and to remove former president Ion Iliescu and former Prime Minister Petre Roman from public life.

Armand says she does not believe in the left–right politics paradigm, arguing that, in Romania, the money wasted due to corruption is far higher than the differences between standard left and right policies. Nevertheless, she considers herself, within the French political context, a person that is naturally right-wing, but that Romania currently has many people who need the help of the state and that these people, who did not adapt to the changes and are no longer useful to society, should be re-integrated.