While this year’s presidential elections in France saw the first return to power of a socialist administration in 17 years, it also landmarked a significant resurgence of the French far-right party, the Front National (FN).
If the clear victory of François Hollande was widely forecast, opinion survey institutes and political observers were largely taken by surprise at both the extent of the Far Right’s revival and the comparatively weak result of the offensive against it mounted by the Radical Left. Now, a French academic researcher has completed a revealing study of those communities where the FN did best, and the conclusions contradict many clichés about its grass-roots supporters.
FN candidate, Marine Le Pen, the party’s 44 year-old leader and the daughter of its founder, scored the highest share of the vote the far-right has ever reached in a presidential poll, with 17.9% - representing more than 6.4 million voters – in the first round vote on April 22nd.
In France’s two-round electoral system, only the two highest-scoring candidates go through to the second round, and Le Pen came third, behind Hollande and the incumbent conservative candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy. However, behind the national vote, Le Pen came first of all ten candidates in almost 6,000 out of France’s 36,700 municipalities, representing just less than one in six.
Laurent Davezies, a specialist in regional policy-making, urbanism and economic development, a professor at the Paris Conservatoire national des arts et Métiers (CNAM) and the Paris school of political sciences, Sciences-Po, has now completed a study of those populations that voted in majority for Le Pen which he describes as “a territorial photo, not a social one”.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
In the first-round vote, Marine Le Pen arrived in first place in 5,855 municipalities, an administrative term can apply equally to villages and towns. In all, this group is made up of quite different populations and geographical locations, ranging from Mazouau, in the Vosges region of eastern France, with a population of just 15, to Martigues, in the southern Mediterranean region of Provence, home to 46,000 people.
However, they share a degree of common characteristics; 5,560 out of the total 5,855 municipalities have populations of less than 3,000. Furthermore, they are situated in 93 of France’s 101 départements – administrative regions roughly equivalent to counties.
Davezies describes them as “peri-urban and rural municipalities, modest but not poor, with few [residents] from immigrant origins.” They contain a higher than average young population which he classifies as “industrious and poorly-qualified, with higher numbers of males than elsewhere.”
“The Left essentially addresses young people, women and those of immigrant origin,” he adds. “These are not the populations that are found in these territories.”
The table above (available in French only) shows the number of municipalities where each of the leading five candidates in the first round voting - presented in order of their national score - came in first place. It also shows the average 2009 per capita annual income of the populations for each group; those who placed Le Pen in first position earned an average yearly 11,197 euros, while average per capita earnings among those municipalities where centre-right candidate François Bayrou came in first position was less, at 10,234 euros. The lowest annual earners (an average 9,919 euros) were in those municipalities where radical-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon came first, while the highest yearly earners were among those who chose Nicolas Sarkozy (an average 14,529 euros). Municipalities where François Hollande came in first position had a yearly per capita average income of 12, 502 euros.
'The ecologists regard them as bastards'
The four most densely populated municipalities that gave Le Pen the highest score, each with a population of more than 30,000, are Istres, Vitrolles, Marignane and Martigues, all situated in the Bouches-du-Rhône département close to Marseille.
Of the 43 others with populations of 10,000 or more, 20 are in the south-east Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region (which includes the Bouches-du-Rhône département), eight are in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region of northern France, six are in the southern Languedoc-Roussillon region, four are in the eastern Alsace region and another four in neighbouring Lorraine, while one is in the Rhône-Alpes region that includes and surrounds the city of Lyon.
Davezies found that the strongest support for Le Pen came from among those populations that had been hardest hit by the effects of the economic crisis beginning in 2008 and 2009. “The 92% of jobs lost during this period concerned male employees,” he commented. “These are often jobs in industry. Those hit are French workers, [who are] strongly present in these territories.”
On average, 19% of the active population among the 5,855 municipalities is made up of manual workers (against a national average of 14%), while just 8% is made up of managerial staff (against a national average of 15%), and 44% of the active female population are employed, as opposed to a national average of 47%. They also have a slightly higher-than-average youth population – under-20s represent 28% of the population as opposed to 26% at a national level.
They have fewer residents living in publicly-subsidised rented housing - an average of just 8% compared to a national average of 15% - and a notably higher number of owner-occupiers, who represent an average 70% compared with a national average of almost 58%.
The average of claimants for the RMI benefit top-up for very low income earners is 1.4% compared to the national average of 1.6%.
Professional activities centre mostly on agriculture, industry and the construction industry, while comparatively fewer people are employed in the public and services sector. The average number of households that own two cars is 43% compared with a national average of 33%, and the distance between home and place of work is an average 25% higher than that for the active French population as a whole.
“They are in a situation that makes them completely rejected. They live a model that the thinking classes detest, in an urban spill with two cars. Urban planners look on them with horror, the ecologists regard them as bastards with their colossal carbon footprint. It’s as if their way of life was denied. They are hard-stretched and on top of that they are told ‘you are bastards’. Somehow, they’ve got it all wrong, they‘ve all made the bad choice. And by voting FN, it’s a way of saying ‘It’s not me who messed up, it’s the world that isn’t right.”
-------------------------
English version: Graham Tearse