Noël Mamère

Biography: Noël Mamère (born 25 December 1948) is a French journalist and politician. He was the mayor of Bègles in Gironde as well as deputy to the French National Assembly for that constituency. He was for several years a member of the party Europe Écologie–The Greens, but left it in late September 2013. Noël Mamère rose to fame in the 1980s as a journalist and anchorman, in particular on Antenne 2. In 1992, he became president of Brice Lalonde's Ecology Generation party, from which he was expelled in 1994. He then founded "Ecology-Solidarity Convergences", of which he was president, before joining Les Verts in 1998. In 2002, he was presidential candidate and garnered 5.25% of the votes. On 5 June 2004, whilst mayor of Bègles, he stirred up controversy by conducting a marriage ceremony for a male homosexual couple, nine years before same-sex marriage became legal in France. The marriage was annulled by the courts on 27 July 2004. The couple appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, who ultimately upheld the annullment in 2016, but acknowledged that, by then, it was now legal for them to get married. Source: Article "Noël Mamère" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.