Photographer Patrick Artinian is following the French presidential election campaign trail for Mediapart, with a series of photo and video reportages of the candidates, their supporters, meetings and the milestone events. The coverage will continue all the way to the final vote on May 6th.
Here he captures the atmosphere at Nicolas Sarkozy’s counter-May Day rally in Paris on May 1st, when the incumbent presidential election candidate, forecast by opinion surveys to be trounced by Socialist Party rival François Hollande in the final play-off on Sunday, called on his supporters to turn out en masse in support of “real labour”. It was a controversial clash with the traditional May Day march held the same afternoon on the other side of the capital in celebration of International Workers’ Day.
The phrase “real labour”, Sarkozy previously explained at a meeting in tours on April 23rd, describes he "who gets up very early every morning and goes to bed late at night, who doesn't ask for congratulations, nor medals, nothing [...] Real labour is he who says 'oh, I don't have great wealth but the wealth I do have means a lot to me because it represents so much sweat, so many thousands and thousands of hours of work, so much pain, so many sacrifices, so much suffering, that wealth will not be stolen from me. I worked hard for that wealth and I have no intention of making apologies for having built this life'.”
The ‘real labour’ rally on May 1st was held on the Trocadero square which stands, overlooking the Eiffel Tower, in one of Paris’ plushest districts where local residents lined their balconies with French tri-colour flags above the crowds below. Sarkozy claimed “There are 200,000 of you” as he began his speech, a figure that defies the capacity of the square. Mediapart’s headcount estimated the crowd at 50,000 at the most.
”Leave the political parties to one side, because your role is not to carry out politics, your role is not to defend an ideology, your role is to defend employees,” Sarkozy said, addressing the trades unions.
Targeting the major CGT union’s historical links to the Communist Party, and whose leader Bernard Thibault has called upon its members to vote for Socialist Party candidate François Hollande, Sarkozy commented: “I will never accept lessons of morals from those who wave the flag that was the standard of so many tyrannical regimes around the world.”
In an attack on what he intimated was the Socialist Party’s link to trades unions, Sarkozy said: “To those who prefer their party to France, we will always counter [them] with those who prefer France to their party. If we are gathered together this 1st of May, it is exactly because we consider France in all its diversity, we assume all of its history, all the spiritual families of France, all the currents, without any exception.”
“No-one has the right to make the France that works feel guilty,” he added to cheers and applause.
Artinian’s reportage begins with a Sarkozy supporter crying out “the Left divided, Nicolas Sarkozy the uniter”, while a group of women, also Sarkozy supporters, answer back “We’re dancing”. As his camera swooped past a line of flag-waving group, they called out “we’re going to win, that’s certain”, “we’re going to win” and “Sarkozy is the best”.
See also: The cloud of Pétain rains on Sarkozy's May Day counter-parade
- For more campaign photo and video reportages, click on the links below:
French elections in images: Hollande ends first-round campaign in Mitterrand's steps
French elections in images: hoarse Hollande targets first round turnout
French elections in images: Sarkozy's last stand, where the guillotine once stood
French elections in images: Hollande rides to the deprived suburbs to rally abstentionists
French elections in images: far-right candidate Le Pen hounded by an opposite 'front'
French elections in images: firebrand Mélenchon calls for 'civic insurrection'
French elections in images: Sarkozy rallies the faithful in Villepinte
French elections in images: Sarkozy's last stand, where the guillotine once stood
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- Patrick Artinian is a Paris-based freelance photographer and a regular contributor to Mediapart, as well as French daily Le Monde, weekly magazine VSD and sports daily L’Equipe. He has previously covered major international events, including the 1989 Armenian earthquake disaster, the 1991 famine disaster in Sudan and the civil war in the former Yugoslavia, in 1993. A member of the Paris photo agency Contact Press Images since 1995, he is currently involved in an extensive photo documentary of contemporary US society.
