Photographer Patrick Artinian is following the French presidential election campaign trail for Mediapart, with a series of photo and video reportages with soundtracks of the candidates, their supporters, meetings and the milestone events. The coverage will continue all the way to the final vote on May 6th.
In this report he captures the atmosphere at President Nicolas Sarkozy’s major rally on Sunday March 10th at a meeting hall in Villepinte, a suburban town north of Paris, where he played his trump cards in an effort to turn around his flagging re-election campaign.
With just 42 days to go before polling begins in the first of the two-round poll, on April 22, Sarkozy’s speech centred on toughening immigration controls, threatening to pull out of the Schengen passport-free zone that binds France and 25 other European countries, a call for commercial protectionism with the creation of an EU-wide, US-modelled ‘Buy European Act’, while lauding his own role in the creation of the European Stability Mechanism bailout fund designed to buffer the euro debt crisis.
An estimated 30,000 supporters attended the event, brought to the hall near Charles-de-Gaulle airport by Sarkozy’s ruling UMP party on chartered trains and buses from across the country. Waving blue, white and red French tricolour flags, they boisterously cheered the incumbent, regularly chanting “We’re going to win”.
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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 US society.
