MARSEILLE, France (CN) — Marseille is the exception to many rules.
The south of France often connotes exclusivity and excessive displays of wealth, but this city is its counterpoint. Teenagers tear through seaside aqueducts on motorcycles, music is always loud and pastis — the local anise-flavored liqueur — costs less than sparkling water. It’s known for being one of the most culturally diverse places in France. Social activism is part of its ethos.
So it may seem counterintuitive that France’s second-largest city is an exception to the political rule that metropolises vote left. But in this week’s snap elections, the far-right National Rally, known as the RN, won three out of seven constituencies in Marseille. In 2022, the party took just one.
In other major cities — Paris, Lyon and Toulouse — the RN failed to carry a single district.
“In most big French cities, the RN is in a situation of great weakness,” Emmanuel Négrier, political scientist at the Center for Political and Social Studies, told Courthouse News. “In Marseille, this isn’t the case — first, because it’s a very big city; then there’s a combination of political, urban and sociological factors that explain this.”
Historically, Marseille has roots in the right.
The south of France, in general, remains a far-right stronghold. The right was the prominent governing force of the city for decades. Jean-Claude Gaudin, the right-wing mayor who led Marseille for 25 years, is a controversial figure who initially attributed eight deaths from the collapse of two residential buildings in 2018 to heavy rainfall. Gaudin made deals with the RN to gain prominence across the region.
“The RN has been well established in Marseille since the '80s, and hovers around 30% to 32% of the electorate depending on the neighborhoods and the elections,” Michel Peraldi, a sociologist who has written several books on the city, told Courthouse News. “But we have an RN that is very stable in Marseille.”
The city didn’t exclusively vote for the RN, though. In the Cours Julien, a trendy neighborhood in the center of town, the metro is covered in wheat-paste posters advocating for the New Popular Front, the left-wing coalition that won the most votes nationally.
Another poster reading, “Up against Le Pen, it’s for equality,” lines nearby streets. In the constituency that encloses the hyper-center of Marseille, Manuel Bompard — from the controversial hard-left France Unbowed, known as LFI — won with 67% in the first round.
French President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Ensemble coalition didn’t win a single constituency in Marseille. He has been widely criticized as elitist and out of touch with the general population; during pension reform protests last year, multiple signs depicted Macron as the monarch Louis XVI. He’s never been able to gain the confidence of the working class.
Instead, parties on either end of the political spectrum split those votes.
“First, there is, like everywhere in France, a competition to obtain working-class votes, a marked competition between LFI and the RN,” Négrier said. “In Marseille, it’s a bit of both, meaning there are working-class neighborhoods where the RN scores big … and there are other cases where LFI wins the election and concentrates the working-class votes.”
Négrier said there’s a big population of young people, students and creatives who aren’t necessarily well-off, but who are interested in culture and participate in social activism: These people vote for LFI. On the other hand, working-class residents outside of the city center, along with the city’s small bourgeoisie population, tend to vote RN.
Marseille is huge — 92 square miles, more than double the size of Paris and four times the size of Lyon. While other cities have suburbs, the outskirts of Marseille are integrated into the city, which could have an impact on the RN voter turnout, according to Peraldi. The city limits encompass extremes.
In the center, it’s not uncommon to see uninhabited buildings held up with structural supports. Along the coast, hillsides are scattered with mansions overlooking the Mediterranean. Peraldi said homeowners in the region tend to vote RN, while most of LFI’s votes come from renters.
“It’s a city which concentrates extreme poverty on the one hand, and a high level of social inequality on the other,” Négrier said. “We’ve observed in urban sociology that this is one of the factors that reinforces the RN vote; It’s in cities where there is a fairly relative level of equality between different categories of citizens that the RN vote is a little weaker than elsewhere.”
Right-wing critics have long held that Marseille is poor, dangerous and overridden with immigrants, which complements the RN's narrative.
Jordan Bardella, the party's 28-year-old president, identified three key pillars of his mandate as purchasing power, immigration and security. If he had won an absolute majority in the snap elections, Bardella planned to introduce legislation designed to boost purchasing power, harshen criminal sentences and strip immigrants of some constitutional rights.
On Thursday morning in the Belsunce, a diverse working-class neighborhood in central Marseille, a young man — who asked not to give his name — was working at the checkout counter of a perfume shop, contemplating why the RN’s turnout was so high.
“It’s racism, I think,” he said. “There are a lot of foreigners in Marseille, and we’re like brothers and sisters at the base, but Bardella wants to make clans — he wants to put all of the French on one side, and everyone else on the other.”
When his colleague walked in, she said she was shocked at the RN’s turnout.
“We don’t see them!” she said of the far-right population in the city.
Despite becoming more mainstream in recent years, the RN still remains widely taboo in France.
Peraldi argues that purchasing power in Marseille isn’t more or less threatened than anywhere else in France. And although Marseille is widely known for its diversity, Peraldi said that there hasn’t been a wave of migration to the city for a long time — that happens more where there’s work to be found.
“Anyone can understand that from a common sense point of view,” he said. “Marseille is still more or less an economically dormant city.”
Instead, the port city's diversity tends to come from immigration that has spanned generations.
“There has been a large Algerian population in Marseille with people who have arrived since 1907,” Peraldi said. “You have some families who are the ninth generation of Algerians in Marseille. Do we still consider these people foreigners? Do we still consider these people migrants?"
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