“Bordeaux was at the top when we asked our employees where they wanted to go,” he said of France’s fifth-largest metropolitan area, which has good weather, cheaper housing than Paris and a thriving technology scene. Mayeux now has an office staffed by approximately 400 game engineers and designers in a modern refurbished harbor neighborhood. Just an hour away by car or train, Sainte-Foy-la-Grande could not be more different. The small medieval town on the Dordogne River once prospered in an economy anchored by wine production, but is now one of the poorest communities in mainland France. As jobs dried up and shops closed, the center was tarnished by about 400 vacant or dilapidated buildings. The slums rent cheap rooms to migrant workers and welfare recipients who can not afford them anywhere else. Nearly half of the 2,600 population lives in poverty and unemployment is about five times the national average. “We are fighting to save Sainte-Foy,” said Christelle Guionie, a former teacher who was elected mayor with the Socialist Party in 2020. These two extremes in the French department of Gironde reflect the reality of France today as voters prepare to elect their next president on April 24: the country has suffered deep rifts between places where people are doing well, led by urban centers and attractive tourist areas and places where they are not located, including small towns and rural areas as well as poor suburbs.
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The far-right candidate, Marine Le Pen, set out to win over rural working-class voters in what she calls a “forgotten France” at the heart of her second attempt to defeat incumbent Emanuel Macron. Focusing heavily on cost of living issues, he has campaigned almost exclusively outside of large cities with small gatherings and visits to local markets, characterizing Macron as an unknown elitist who does not understand people’s daily struggles. Although the concentration of power and wealth in Paris is often blamed on inequality with the provinces, similar scenarios are brewing across the country. Medium-sized cities such as Bordeaux, Lyon, Toulouse and Nantes have enjoyed more than a decade of demographic and economic growth, often at the expense of their regions. The reasons are many: as in many other major Western economies, the economic forces liberated from globalization have destroyed France’s industrial and agricultural base and replaced them with an economy based on tourism and services that favors cities and the well-educated. employees. Gironde’s apartment is emblematic of the “new organization of the territory”, says Jérôme Fourquet, political analyst and author of the important book The French Archipelago. Proximity to an urban center or an attractive tourist area now determines a lot about the worldview and financial situation of people, he says, and therefore influences the way they vote. In 2017, people who lived closer to cities or had better rail connections to them voted overwhelmingly in favor of Macron over Le Pen, according to his research. “Voting standards today are no longer determined by the choice between the traditional parties of the left and the right, which for decades represented secular and catholic France respectively,” he said. “Geography has become the dividing line of the new France.”
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It is a gap that Le Pen seeks to exploit. When the National Rassemblement candidate arrived in Gironde in late March, she did not stop in Bordeaux before heading north to hold a rally in Saint-Martin-Lacaussade, a town of 1,061 people, surrounded by vineyards. It was a calculated decision. People close to her campaign said that her strategy was to reactivate a class vote against the “elite bloc” that supports Macron with her “popular bloc”. The emphasis on rural areas is also combined with Le Pen’s anti-immigrant stance, as most foreign-born in France live concentrated around Paris and other cities. In a municipal gymnasium decorated with flags, an audience of RN supporters applauded its promise to stop “sacrificing farmers on the altar of free trade” and end the “irrational” energy policies dictated by Brussels. Calling for “demilitarization”, Lepen said she would put an end to policies that make rural areas “vampires from the cities”. “This is justice that I will return to you, here in the forgotten lands of France,” he said. The message reached home with Jean-Luc Broussat, a retired farmer who drove two hours south of his home in Bordeaux to hear Le Pen speak. “There are no other doctors near where we live, so my wife has to drive for an hour to get proper care for her heart condition,” he says. “And it is becoming increasingly difficult to make a decent living from agriculture. “If she wins, Marin will do something for us.”
The crescent of poverty
Wealth in Gironde is concentrated in Bordeaux and the ring of passenger communities it supports, as well as along the Atlantic coast in places such as Cap Ferret and Arcachon, where the wealthy and retirees have beach houses. Saint-Martin-Lacaussade, on the other hand, is in what officials refer to as the “crescent of poverty” that extends from the Médoc wine region to the north via the Sainte-Foy-La Grande at the southeastern end of the district. It includes cities that lend their names to some of France’s most expensive wines, such as Saint-Estèphe and Saint-Julien. But while tourists flock to the nearby billionaire Château Latour or Château Lafite Rothschild nearby, the cities look like empty shells. In Pauillac, where Le Pen won the most votes in this year’s first round and in 2017, life-size trompe l’oeil stickers have been stuck in empty shop windows to look like framing art galleries and street food stores. Residents of these rural areas and small towns are feeling increasingly abandoned as local trade shrinks and public services such as hospitals, courts and local train stations close. This translated into a growing vote in favor of the far right and the far left, as well as an increase in abstention rates.
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Together, Lepen, her far-right opponent Eric Zemour and the anti-capitalist left, Jean-Luc Melanson, garnered 50% to 70% of the vote in the “crescent of poverty”. The far right actually won support in these poor areas compared to the 2017 elections, while Mélenchon’s share fell slightly. In the more prosperous parts of Gironde, the patterns differed. In Bordeaux, voters backed Macron with 33 percent in the first round, Melanson with 29 percent, Le Pen with just 8 percent and Zemour with 7 percent. Along the coast in Arcachon, it was 40 percent for Macron, 28 percent for Le Pen and Zemour together and only 9 percent for Melanson. Geography is not the only factor in these results, says Mathieu Gallard of the Ipsos poll, who says voters’ level of optimism also plays a role in their choice. The 43 percent who are very happy with their lives choose Macron, while the 46 percent who are very dissatisfied support Le Pen. The “somewhat dissatisfied”, about 37 percent, support Mélenchon. The two political movements that gave France its presidents from 1958 to 2017 – the Golist center-right, now known as the Les Républicains party – and the Socialists are more or less absent. Both evaporated after Macron came to power with a new political party and a promise to modernize France by ruling “neither right nor left” – between them, at national level, they received less than 7 percent of the vote in this first round. at a time. The political landscape of these elections confirmed three forces: the far right with Le Pen and Zemour, the center with Macron and the radical left with Melanson. Although only Macron and Le Pen went to the second round, the choices of Melanson’s voters will be the key to determining the winner. Whether this remodeling will last remains to be seen. Fourquet believes that things have not yet stabilized: “If this was a Netflix series, the 2017 election started in the first season and we are just at the beginning of the second season.” Presidential candidates’ campaign posters: from left, Emmanuel Macron, Jean Lassalle and Marine Le Pen © Philippe Lopez / AFP / Getty Images
The Bordeaux explosion
Bordeaux went through its own political upheaval last year when a green candidate won center-right for the first time, showing how the city has moved to the left under the influence of newcomers who are attracted there by economic growth and quality of LIFE. Mélenchon scores improved by 6 points in the first round compared to 2017, reflecting his strong performance in the cities. Estelle Ricard, a 43-year-old who founded a travel agency that runs wine tours, is one of those who benefited from the Bordeaux boom. Its business has grown as more international tourists have flocked to the city, although the pandemic has been difficult. “Things are improving now and my quality of life here is excellent,” he said. The city had been in a state of stagnation for more than two decades, beginning when then-Mayor Alain Juppé began rebuilding the “sleeping well” port. Major projects enhanced the attractiveness of the city, such as …
