Pointing to the gangs of youths loitering around one of the most crime-ridden housing estates outside Paris, local resident Youssef Rachidi says that after five years of a socialist government nothing has improved, reprots The Financial Times.
“We voted socialist, and these are the sad results,” says the 46-year-old Moroccan and part-time manual labourer who has lived in the La Grande Borne, in the southern suburbs of Paris, for more than a decade.
Known for drug dealing, arms trafficking, and youth delinquency, 40 per cent of the predominantly immigrant residents in this estate live below the poverty line. One in two children leaves school with no qualifications.
In recent years, the estate has also become synonymous with homegrown Islamist extremism. Amédy Coulibaly, who killed a policewoman and four other people in a kosher supermarket in 2015, grew up there.
Disadvantaged suburbs such as La Grande Borne, home to about 7 percent of the French population, have always been fiercely leftwing. They voted overwhelmingly for socialist president François Hollande in 2012.
But after five years of disappointment with Mr Hollande’s government, which failed to get a grip on unemployment and moved to the political right with pro-business reforms, France’s poor suburbs appear to have turned against the party.
“With just days to go until the election, disillusionment with the Socialist Party is extremely high,” says Antoine Jardin, a researcher at Sciences Po university. “They feel the Hollande government did not keep its promises.”
The big question, he says, is who these disaffected socialist voters will now support in the first round of France’s presidential election on Sunday, a nail-biting race between four leading candidates with radically different visions for the country.
The election could hinge on their votes, as polls show there is such a small gap between the candidates in the first round.
According to Ifop, the pollster, centrist Emmanuel Macron is on 23 per cent, the far-right leader Marine Le Pen is on 22 per cent, while conservative François Fillon and the far-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon are both on 19 per cent.
But at La Grande Borne’s local discount Halal supermarket, located in a bleak warehouse attached to a commercial parking lot, 32-year-old Aleah Barki says only one thing is clear to her about this election: she will not vote socialist. “No, no, of course I won’t [vote socialist],” she says, as she hauls out bags of frozen meat and pre-cut potatoes.
She says she is considering voting instead for Mr Mélenchon, the far-left leader who promises more spending, a 100 per cent tax rate on the rich and who has surged in the polls in recent weeks. “I might vote Mélenchon in the end,” says Ms Barki. “He seems to care about ordinary people.”