'Mélenchon? Never heard of him': the battle by leftwing party LFI to win over small-town France
France's La France Insoumise party usually takes advantage of the summer political pause to tour deprived working class urban areas where it traditionally enjoys strong support. This year, however, the radical left party has opted to visit villages and smaller towns across France where it and its former presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon are less well-known – and generally less popular. Floriane Louison reports on the party's visit to the town of Roanne in the south-east of the country.
RoanneRoanne is a medium-sized town in the south-east of France, and one of those places which rarely makes the news. Politically, too, nothing very much out of the ordinary takes place here. Its 33,000 residents vote in line with national trends. Indeed, in 2017 the local vote almost exactly mirrored the national result in the presidential election, right down to an almost identical turnout rate. At the presidential election last year the voting changed a little. The townsfolk voted in slightly greater numbers for Emmanuel Macron, and the far-right gained ground. As for the radical left La France Insoumise (LFI), its share of the vote remained stable and relatively low. In the 2022 Parliamentary elections Ismaël Stevenson, the LFI candidate representing the broad leftwing coalition NUPES, did not make it beyond the first round of voting.
