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.
Here he follows far-right Front National candidate Marine Le Pen on her campaign trail in the Seine-et-Marne département (county) that lies just east of Paris, where she was hounded by supporters of the radical-left Front de Gauche alliance, whose candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon is riding neck-and neck with Le Pen in opinion polls.
The reportage opens with her visit on March 22nd to Trilport, close to the town of Meaux, about 30 kilometres from the capital. She had been invited there by a group of postal workers who describe themselves as a ‘collective’ with no political or union affiliations. In January they wrote to five presidential candidates, including Le Pen, to draw attention to their protest over working conditions and the future privatization of the French postal services.
Le Pen, they said, was the only candidate to have responded. She duly denounced the “enormous suffering” of postal workers who she said were treated “like machines”, called for “a freezing of privatization” rather than “submitting to the diktat of Brussels”, and the re-opening of post offices closed in rural areas.
A group from the radical-left Front de Gauche alliance heckled her during her meeting with the postal workers’ collective, notably when she described trades unions as being “accomplices” of government, who “smothered the anger of employees”.
On March 24th she returned to Meaux, whose mayor and MP is Jean-François Copé, head of President Sarkozy’s ruling UMP party, where she handed out leaflets during the local weekend market. There she was again met by Front de Gauche supporters, who angrily shouted “Resistance, resistance” while Le Pen went on a hand-shaking walkabout among the stalls.
Asked if she thought Front de Gauche candidate Mélenchon was capturing a part of the Front National’s electorate, she dismissed the idea, saying that she could not see how her supporters could be tempted by Mélenchon who was in favour of “massive immigration”.
With strained smiles and closely watched over by her bodyguards, Le Pen and her entourage, hounded by the noisy group from the Front de Gauche, ended the visit with a rendition of the French national anthem, La Marseillaise, followed by cheers of “Vive la France”. In reply, the Front de Gauche group, with clenched fists raised high, launched into song with The Internationale, the traditional anthem of the Left.
Previous reports in the series:
French elections in images: firebrand Mélenchon calls for 'civic insurrection'
French elections in images: Sarkozy rallies the faithful in Villepinte
-------------------------
- 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.
