Rue du Sergent-Maginot, in the 16e arrondissement, just next to the Parc des Princes and the ring road. Maybe that’s where, every 1is May, the leaders of the National Rally (RN) should now lay a wreath, rather than at the foot of the statue of Joan of Arc. In one of the polling stations installed in this street, Marine Le Pen indeed recorded Sunday, April 24 a striking success: more than one voter in three (33.96%) chose a ballot in his name. A score she had never known elsewhere in Paris. The sign that, despite many obstacles, the far right is gaining some ground in this capital which is always very opposed to it.
As in 2017, Emmanuel Macron largely won on Sunday in Paris, with 85.1% of the vote. He came first in all the boroughs, all the polling stations. The supporters of the “start-up nation”, business leaders, many executives often voting in the center or on the right have given him their support. “With the pandemic and the war, we were lucky to have a young, responsible and courageous president”, applauded Joséphine, a lawyer at the end of her career, leaving her polling station on 7e arrondissement, Sunday, a bottle of champagne in hand – “I receive all my children for lunch”.
To these membership votes were added those, more constrained, voters determined to prevent the far right from coming to power. This is how Emmanuel Macron achieved massive scores in neighborhoods anchored on the left. He obtained more than 89% in four boroughs (3e9e10e11e).
Jump in the number of voters
The prospect of having to choose between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, however, prompted many voters, including Jean-Luc Mélenchon, to take refuge in abstention or the blank vote. In Paris, abstention rose from 21.69% to 25.9% from one round to another. Similarly, the number of empty envelopes, blank or void ballot papers soared, rising in two weeks from 1.52% to 6.27% of registered voters.
With such an overwhelming vote for Macron, the capital finds itself disconnected from the rest of the country. The rise of Marine Le Pen in this “France from above” is no less notable. In five years, facing the same rival, the RN candidate saw her result in the second round of the presidential election go from 10.32% to 14.90%.
The leader of the far-right party notably captured more than 25% of the votes cast in 25 of the 899 polling stations in Paris. For many, these are offices located on the outskirts of Paris, near the ring road, such as rue du Sergent-Maginot, but also boulevard Kellermann (13e district), avenue Maurice-d’Ocagne (14e) or boulevard de Reims (17e). As for a long time, the map of the vote for Marine Le Pen is thus superimposed to a large extent on that of the cheap red brick dwellings, these ancestors of the HLMs built in the years 1920-1930 on the old “zone” surrounding Paris . It is in this strip on the outskirts of the city that there is a lot of social housing, as well as real pockets of poverty, and that some soldiers live.
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