It was Easter Sunday in Nice, France’s fifth-largest city, exactly one week before the first round of the country’s presidential election. In the old town, there were armed police guarding the Cathedral of Sainte-Réparate—part of the country’s continuing state of emergency. Inside, the church was full. A few minutes’ walk away, the Promenade des Anglais, the Mediterranean city’s famous seaside walkway that was the site of last July’s devastating terrorist attack, was also packed.
On Easter Monday Nice-Matin, the
city’s newspaper of record, reported that those in the tourism industry were,
like the churchgoers, singing “resurrection songs of praise.” Tourists were
back. But what about France itself? All the presidential candidates who took
part in Sunday’s first round-election were promising a resurrection too, but,
in Nice at least, many voters were suffering a crisis of faith.
The presidency of the Socialist Francois Hollande has
long been considered a failure, and opinion polls had long indicated just how
disillusioned the electorate had become with the political establishment. To a
great extent this was confirmed by Sunday’s result. The candidate of the
Socialists and the traditional party of the left, got a dismal 6.3 percent of
the vote and for the first time since the founding of the Fifth Republic in
1958, there will be no candidate in the second round from any of the mainstream
parties. The other establishment party, the conservative Republicans, led by
former prime minister François Fillon, failed to advance, getting just 19.9
percent. By contrast the parties of the extreme right and left did remarkably
well. Jean-Luc Melenchon, on the far left, got 19.6 percent and Marine Le Pen,
of the far right National Front (FN), took 21.4 percent—enough to qualify for
second place and a spot in the runoff election on May 7.
In the second round Le Pen will run against Emmanuel
Macron, the thirty-nine-year-old former economics minister and founder of a
party barely a year old, En Marche!, which took 23.9 percent on Sunday. In the
face of a far-right finalist, almost the entire French establishment has gotten
behind Macron and his centrist movement, and the polls have suggested that
Macron could win by as much as 62 percent to 38 percent for Le Pen. But the
establishment itself is much out of favor, and however he tries to distance
himself from it, Macron is very much its creature. Wide though the gap may be
today, abstentionism, another major terrorist attack, or something else as yet
unforeseen could swing the vote.
A visit to the Côte d’Azur gives some sense of how this
situation came about. First was the abysmal performance of the current
administration. By last year Hollande’s ratings had dropped so low that he
decided not to run for a second term. His promises of reform and economic
rejuvenation were largely unfulfilled. France has first-rate infrastructure and
heath care, but taxes are high. The country’s growth has been lingering in the
doldrums since the financial crash of 2008. Its unemployment rate is almost 10
percent, or about six million people. Its youth unemployment rate is close to
25 percent. (Britain’s unemployment rate is 4.7 percent and Germany’s is 3.9
percent.) Writing in Le Figaro on April 19, a group of economists noted that in
1980 France’s per capita GDP was 20 percent higher than that of Britain but
that by 2015 Britain had overtaken it.
These issues have affected more prosperous areas as well.
A few days before the first-round vote, I visited Eze, an attractive and
wealthy town in the hills above Nice, where I met Vanessa Vada, an activist for
Macron’s centrist party. Macron has not proved particularly strong in this part
of the country, and Vada told me that one of her (and his) motivations was to
avoid the populist nationalism that had recently triumphed in the United States
and Britain. However, while she was hopeful that Macron would win, she was
frightened that the strong emotions many feel about problems today could
produce an unpleasant surprise in the final round. “I am getting worried that
people will go and vote for just one reason…they are pissed off!”
All parties also need to fight the upcoming June
parliamentary elections. Macron’s party, whose initials “EM” are the same as
his own, has no seats in the outgoing parliament because it is new, and
France’s electoral system means that the FN had only two out of 577 seats in
the last parliament. To govern effectively, the new president will need a
majority of deputies to support him or her in the assembly. So, even though
things look good for Macron now, he has won a battle but certainly not won the
war. Add together the votes of Le Pen, Melenchon, and the marginal candidates
and you find that up to 49 percent voted for anti-EU, anti-establishment, and
mostly Russian-friendly platforms. That gives you an idea of just how fed up
many French are. The day after the election Macron was already being criticized
for complacency. When the first results came out he gave a victory speech as if
he had already become president and then celebrated at a smart Paris
restaurant, which drew unfavorable comparisons with Nicholas Sarkozy,
Hollande’s bling-loving predecessor.
“All upturned,” said the banner headline of Nice-Matin on
the morning after the election. It is as true for Nice as it is for France as a
whole. Except for soldiers patrolling the streets, however, a visitor might be
hard-pressed to notice anything untoward or tense here. The city basks by the
sea. Oligarchs’ yachts, or rather small ships, sit at anchor waiting for a
brief visit from their masters. Cheap airlines bring millions of visitors to
the South of France. Nearby, Cannes is preparing for its seventieth annual film
festival in mid-May, and the world’s tennis stars have been battling it out in
the Monte-Carlo Rolex Masters. Next month the Monaco Grand Prix will bring yet
more people to stay in Nice, and after that the summer season begins.
On July 14 last year, just after the Bastille Day
fireworks, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a Tunisian Muslim who had been exposed to
jihadist ideas, drove a truck down the Promenade, killing eighty-six people and
injuring 434. Eight months earlier Islamist terrorists had killed 130 and
wounded 368 in attacks in Paris. The country is still under a state of
emergency. The Nice and Paris attacks were only the biggest and most
spectacular examples of extremist violence of the last few years. The last one
was on April 20, when a convicted criminal and presumed Islamist murdered a
policeman on Paris’s Champs Élysées.
The Côte d’Azur has long been a stronghold of the right.
On Sunday the conservative Fillon beat Le Pen in Nice, 26.1 percent to her
25.28 percent, and Macron came third with 20.52 percent. However, in the wider
Alpes-Maritime region Le Pen outperformed Fillon 27.75 percent to 27.39
percent, and Macron scored just 19.04 percent. The FN has always done well
here, though the electoral system means that the traditional right has kept a
firm grip on power. Compared to the presidential election in 2012, when Le Pen
also ran but did not get into the second round, she moved from second place in
the region to first.
The FN’s first big supporters were pieds-noirs, French
who had left Algeria after independence in 1962 and settled in the south. In
2015 Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, the niece of Marine Le Pen, received 45.22 percent
of the vote in the second round of the regional elections. In recent years, the
traditional right has had to move rightward to stop its voters from going over
to Le Pen. But Vada is correct. Watching Le Pen and Fillon on television,
watching Fillon address a rally of five thousand people in Nice in the final
days before the first-round election, and talking to ordinary people who said
they were likely to vote for either of these two candidates, I often felt like
I was listening to a French version of the Brexit and Trump campaigns, with
many of the same fears about foreigners and globalization eroding the
livelihoods of citizens.
On Easter Monday I chatted with Sabine, a woman in her
fifties, who was chopping lemons in front of stalls of ice packed with fresh
lobsters, prawns, and oysters for sale outside the Café Turin on the beautiful
Place Garibaldi. “You English,” she said, explaining why she was going to vote
for Le Pen, “have been very brave to leave Europe,” and that is what she wanted
France to do and what, in effect, Le Pen is promising. Taxes were too high,
Sabine said. If your business was very small, you got help, and if you were
rich you hid your money abroad. But if you were anywhere in-between “you just
have to pay, pay, pay.” Her motivations for voting for Le Pen seemed similar to
her British and American counterparts who voted for Trump and Brexit. Too many
foreigners were flooding into France and they often got all sorts of state aid,
“and my parents have a tiny pension and they have to pay for that!”
If Le Pen comes to power on May 7, she says her first
task would be to take back control of the country’s borders, which are
supposedly open because France is in Europe’s Schengen zone. Even if she does
not there is little doubt that Macron would need to use his time in power to
tackle the question of migration. It has long been the issue at the heart of
the FN’s policies, even if Marine Le Pen has, since taking over the party from
her father in 2011, purged it, at least in public, of its worst racist
elements.
In fact, amid the state of emergency, some enhanced
immigration controls have already been put in place. Police watch the cars
coming over the border from Italy, and pull some over for questioning. I came
to Nice on a local train from Ventimiglia, the first town on the other side of
the border. Many migrants and refugees destined for France, and especially
Africans who have crossed the Sahara and paid smugglers to take them on the
dangerous crossing from Libya, pass through here. I went to the train
twenty-five minutes before it left and saw a dozen or so Africans waiting on the
platform or in the carriages, which were otherwise empty. I came back five
minutes before the train left and the Africans had vanished, but the train had
now filled up with other passengers. I asked the French train conductor whether
the Italian police had shooed them away. “Oh no,” she said, “they are hiding in
the cupboards or under the seats.”
Ten minutes after the train departed, we arrived at the
first French station. The police got on and walked down the train opening all
the cupboards, which contain the electrics and plumbing. “It is a game of cat
and mouse,” said the conductor. One of the policemen told me that at the moment
they were catching about two hundred people a day on the trains and sending
them back to Italy. Later I heard that the more determined or richer migrants
and refugees pay smugglers from the Roya valley, a mountainous area of the
border, to help them trek to France.
I was at the Café Turin because I had an appointment
there with Patrick Allemand. He is a veteran Niçois Socialist who supported
Macron, judging, like many others—and correctly, as the polls proved—that
Benoît Hamon, the Socialist candidate, had no chance of winning. “We have never
had an election like this,” Allemand said. “There is not much engagement. Not
much fervor. People are in disarray and many don’t know whom to vote for.”
Usually, people knew whom they were going to vote for well in advance, but this
year, a lot of people didn’t.
According to Allemand, the problem was not just that the
last five years had been a huge disappointment, but that “there is a feeling
that no one can do any better.” Even many ordinary Le Pen supporters seem
underwhelmed. One pensioner I spoke to, named Jean-Jacques, said that migration
needed to be stopped or controlled and Le Pen was the woman to do it, but that,
in the end, “she would not pass” the second round.
Allemand was glum. If Le Pen was elected then the
consequences would be cataclysmic, but they would be too if Melenchon somehow
got through. He did not, but what he has done is change the face of the French
left. Hamon’s dismal showing—and Melenchon’s respectable one—means that between
now and the parliamentary elections, there is a lot still to sort out on the
left. Melenchon ran a slick campaign and, like Obama in 2008, made innovative
use of modern technology. He addressed rallies in seven cities at once by
appearing in all but one of them as a hologram. He talked about ecology,
kicking out the bankers, and his 100 percent tax rate on earnings above
€400,000. His opponents painted him as a Chavez-loving Communist, which he
denied, but next to him Bernie Sanders would look like a conservative. He was
close to Le Pen in his anti-European and pro-Russian views. And like Le Pen, he
wants France out of NATO.
“For the left Europe is central and its future will be
determined by who wins, so it is not just social and economic questions,” said
Allemand. “We have a central position. If France goes it will all collapse.”
Unless Le Pen can turn the tables and win on May 7, that is a fate that France
and Europe seem to have avoided for now, but Macron and whoever wins the German
election in September are on notice that they have only a few years to make
profound changes to save Europe’s established order.
Back in Eze last week, I found the mayor, Stéphane
Cherki, talking to people in the streets. The village has 3,000 permanent
residents, he said, which grows to 12,000 in summer, along with, over the
course of the year, some 1.2 million tourists. He was an independent but
supported Fillon. The old town, with its spectacular views, is full of souvenir
shops, selling anything you can possibly imagine made of lavender, paintings,
fridge magnets, and so on. With so many tourists and so much money pouring in,
it is not really surprising that the mayor tells me: “To be quite honest, we
don’t really have any problems.” Even so, he was worried about Le Pen. If she
is elected, he said, “it would be a catastrophe. No more tourists will come.”
Referring to Trump’s victory, he added: “I heard there are many fewer visitors
in New York.”
Though they are less apparent on the Côte d’Azur, France
is well known for its suburban areas scarred by deep problems of unemployment,
drugs, and crime. When I asked Cherki to suggest a place nearby that is
struggling he sent me to La Trinité, another small town abutting Nice. No
tourists come to this mostly white, middle-class area. Young families come here
because it is much cheaper than Nice, said Jean-Paul Dalmasso, the mayor, and
then commute into the city. France’s failure to pull out of the economic crisis
meant that his subsidies from Paris had been cut by 50 percent, which was
forcing him to make budget cuts. At the same time, he needed to spend more on
things like security cameras to keep people safe. At Christmas people had
grumbled because he had announced that to save money, there would be no
Christmas lights in town. In other words, his problems were relative. Dalmasso
also told me he was throwing his weight behind Fillon. He was one of the few in
La Trinité who did, though. Le Pen scored a whopping 40.76 percent here,
followed by Melenchon at 20.9 percent.
A few minutes’ walk from La Trinité is the river Paillon,
which separates it from Ariane, a working-class but well-maintained suburb
within the boundaries of Nice. Lots of people, mostly of African and Arab North
African descent, were walking over the bridge coming from or going to Auchan, a
big supermarket in La Trinité. On the market square in Ariane an old church has
been taken over by a Catholic association called Mir, which helps some three
hundred needy families. They can come here and, for a symbolic amount, buy
food. Jean-Claude Watry, a volunteer, said that about 80 percent of Ariane’s
30,000 people were either immigrants or children of immigrants. There are two
mosques and three Muslim prayer rooms. This is one of the poorest areas of
Nice, but, he conceded, there are plenty of areas in other parts of France that
are far worse off. There are people from fourteen ethnic groups here and, while
a majority are Muslim, many immigrants are not. They include Spanish Roma, for
example, who are evangelical Christians.
In the market everyone was closing up for the day. Two
men, both sons of North African immigrants, were cleaning up their mobile
rotisserie, Le Roi du Poulet. They did not want to give their names but said
they would vote for Melenchon. “He is the one that makes me least scared,” said
one. It is estimated that up to 80 percent of French Muslims voted for Hollande
in the last election. This time despondency reigns. Religious Muslims, like
religious Catholics, opposed the legalization of gay marriage. After the big
Paris terrorist attack they also did not like Hollande’s suggestion that French
jihadis could have their citizenship stripped. They worried that fear and
paranoia concerning Muslim immigrants might one day cause the authorities to
take away their citizenship too.
In a local shop there was an election poster but it was
to remind Algerian citizens of that country’s upcoming elections. In a café I
chatted with a group of young men whose parents had been immigrants from North
Africa. Out of ten, only five of them had jobs. It had always been hard to get
work, they said, but now, with their names, it was even harder. They were the
double victims of the terrorists. Muslims were killed like everyone else but
then Muslims were blamed for the attacks. “We are hit both ways,” said Othman,
aged twenty-five, who worked as a waiter and told me about his neighbors, who
were related to the first victim of the Nice truck attack. It is hard to be
completely sure how many Muslims died in the attack, but about 20 percent of
the names suggest a Muslim background.
One place where I did not detect many Muslims was a
Fillon rally on the other side of Nice. Most of those who had come were white,
middle-class, and middle-aged or older. Fillon thundered on about General de
Gaulle, just like Brexiteers always go on about Winston Churchill. There was
“no citizenship without culture and roots,” he said. Lax policing had led to
“lawless zones.” France was the “cradle of our Christian roots.”
Fillon became the candidate for his party in November
2016 because they wanted someone clean
and moral in reaction to the scandal-ridden Sarkozy, the last president from
the right. Since then Fillon has come under investigation by the police for
allegedly paying his wife more than €700,000 of public money for parliamentary
work she never did. There have also been other allegations against him. He had
said he would drop out if he was investigated, but in the end he did not—a
strategic miscalculation for him and his party. From leading the pack his
support bled to Le Pen and to Macron and cost him his place in the second
round. For now, the second-round polls show more Fillon voters opting for
Macron than Le Pen, but they also show a significant number abstaining. So when
Marine Le Pen said she was taking temporary leave from the leadership of the FN
on the day after the elections, it was clear that this was a maneuver designed
above all to attract support from Fillon voters who could not stomach the FN
but might be tempted to vote for her alone. “#Fillon and his lieutenants told
us that #Macron was baby Hollande,” she tweeted sarcastically, “and now they
are calling us to vote for him?”
In her Nice flat Valerie Arboireau, an artist and art
director, showed me one of her works. It was a vintage embroidered sheet
covered in lipstick kisses arranged in such a way that, if you stand back, you
can see they take the shape of breasts. Like others she complained of crushing
taxes and said that while France was good at incubating creative start-ups, she
knew many who had taken their businesses to Britain or Belgium once they began
to succeed. She and many of her friends did not like the right and thought
Macron was “an empty shell into which everything goes,” referring to his
campaign to seek support from left and right. She said she would like to cast a
vote blanc, or blank ballot, in protest. In the end, she said, especially in
the second round she knew she would have “to vote against” someone, who now we
know is Le Pen.
Philippe Metaut, an antique dealer who used to be a
finance director, echoed her. A sort of inertia hung over the poll. He would
vote, above all, to stop the “catastrophe” of the extremes of Melenchon and Le
Pen, and hence “would vote for the least bad candidate.” He and Victoria summed
up the mood of many I met, especially educated, middle-class people. They
resented their position as “useful voters,” meaning people mobilized to vote
against someone they detested, rather than for someone they believed in.
Amid this gloom there is one bright spot in Nice right
now: the Medrano circus. The acts are traditional. The elephants sit on their
hind legs, the tigers jump through hoops, the performing poodles strut their
stuff, the acrobats do amazing things, and a Ukrainian woman pulls a van with
her teeth. The manager is Radu Nepotu, a twenty-six-year-old Moldovan who
decided to do this rather than practice as a lawyer back home. There were
ninety people working in the circus, he said, and only ten of them were French.
“We have got Chinese, Peruvians, Mongolians, Ukrainians, Russians, Moldovans,
Romanians and Germans.”
Nepotu did not seem worried that the election might end
with closed borders, making it hard for his team to work here. As far as he was
concerned the show would go on. When the candidates talk of French culture they
are always making reference to long-dead artists or authors. But, said Nepotu,
the circus was French culture too, “and if they stopped people from coming they
would be forbidding us to create French culture.” The problem, he said, was
that you could not find enough good acts in France. “You have to look
everywhere.” Reflecting a bit he said: “Yes, we pay too much in taxes, but it
is still a great country.” At least someone in Nice didn’t think voters need to
make France great again.
April 24, 2017, 6:26 pm