A 90-minute train ride from Gare de Lyon station in Paris traces a political gulf between big-city voters and the rest, a divide that has shaken up Britain and the US, and has an outside chance of doing the same in France’s upcoming election.
The further you go, the greater the support for the anti-immigrant, anti-Europe National Front, judging by interviews with people living on the RER D commuter line and results from the previous election, a regional poll in 2015.
At Gare de Lyon, 32-year-old stage production manager Victor Leclere likes his multicultural neighborhood in the heart of the capital. With the presidential election just weeks away, he fears the popularity of the National Front.
Photo: Reuters
“We’re used to living all together,” he said as he boarded a train, a former Socialist voter now undecided. “I think it’s worrying, the image portrayed by the National Front, as if France wasn’t the multicultural country it already is.”
Villeneuve-Saint-Georges is just 19 minutes from Paris, but with concrete blocks and highways a world away from the stone buildings and avenues of the center of the capital.
Lucien Ngando, 30, an information technology support technician of Congolese descent, said he could well back Le Pen this time. He was angry with what he described as media bias favoring centrist Emmanuel Macron, whom pollsters see winning a presidential run-off vote in May against National Front leader Marine Le Pen.
“She’s been demonized, ostracized, but I don’t think the National Front is a bad party, we should give them a chance to change things in France,” he said on the RER D platform.
Ngando voted for Socialist French President Francois Hollande in 2012.
He said Le Pen and left-wing firebrand Jean-Luc Melenchon spent more time campaigning outside the capital than the other frontrunners, Macron and conservative Francois Fillon, and understood suburban dwellers better.
Opinion polls predict Le Pen might possibly win the first round of the presidential election on April 23, but would lose the second round on May 7 against either of her main rivals.
The chances of a shock like the Brexit vote in Britain or US President Donald Trump’s election victory depends on people living beyond the main cities, all of which showed relatively low National Front votes in 2015, with the numbers climbing further out.
In Paris, the National Front won nearly 10 percent of the vote in the regional election’s first round, while in Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, a suburb of 32,000, it was almost 29 percent. Second round figures showed a similar pattern.
Not all voters interviewed in Villeneuve-Saint-Georges said they would back Le Pen, but distance from politicians and disgust with a campaign dominated by scandals was keenly felt in a place where unemployment is more than 50 percent above the national average.
“Politicians never come here. We see them on TV, in Paris of course, because it’s not like the suburbs, but in Villeneuve-Saint-Georges? No ... We count for nothing,” 43-year-old stay-at-home mother of eight Isabelle Cauchard said.
Just under 30 percent of voters live in city centers, while over a third live in suburbs like Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, one in four in rural areas and less than one in 10 in medium-sized towns, the INSEE statistics office said.
Within 10km of Paris, the National Front attracted 14 percent of votes on average in the regional election, while it got almost 30 percent in a radius of 20 to 30km and 39 percent in the 70 to 80km range, a study by Ifop pollsters showed.
“It’s a divide between the winners and losers of globalization... In the outskirts, the depressed former industrial bastions, rural enclaves, people feel left on the side of the road, isolated,” Ifop’s Jerome Fourquet said. “Marine Le Pen has understood this very well.”
Wallerand de Saint Just, National Front head for the broader Paris region, has noticed the difference during the campaign.
“There are a lot of street markets in Paris where they’re not giving us a nice welcome at all, but in rural towns they welcome us with open arms,” he said.
The National Front got more than 42 percent of the vote in the regional election’s first round in Malesherbes, a town of about 6,000 set amid fields and forests at the end of one branch of the RER D.
Olivia Berthaut, is a job seeker who moved there for cheaper living costs. She has previously voted for mainstream right candidates, but now says the only other option is an empty envelope in the ballot box.
She said Le Pen understood the problems of rural areas better than others, listing concerns including difficulties getting a doctor’s appointment, poor Internet service and plans to scrap the RER D, the only direct train to Paris.
Le Pen has made the fight for ordinary workers against “globalists” a key theme, presenting herself as their shield against financial markets and EU legislators.
That was the attraction for Frantz Chipan, a 37-year-old school social worker who used to vote center-right.
“I am ‘Marine,’” Chipan said as he stepped off the train at Malesherbes. “I can identify with her thinking, with what she says, I feel more protected.”
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