For whom will the inhabitants of Seine-Saint-Denis vote, this Sunday, during the 1st round of the presidential election? Answer in the evening, while the polling stations will close at 8 p.m. in the forty towns of the department. 793,947 voters are called to the polls, according to the prefecture, in a department which had 1,644,903 inhabitants at the last census.
Five years ago, it was Jean-Luc Mélenchon who came out on top in the first round, with 34.02% of the vote. The candidate of La France Insoumise had obtained very good scores in the largest cities of the department, such as Saint-Denis (43.39%), Montreuil (40.08%) or Aubervilliers (41.1%), which have long were strong communist strongholds in the red suburbs, only Montreuil still being administered by the PCF.
Across the department, Jean-Luc Mélenchon was then ahead of Emmanuel Macron (24.04%), then Marine Le Pen (13.59%), François Fillon (12.76%) and Benoît Hamon (8.41%) , when France placed the head of LFI in third position behind Macron and Le Pen. It was in Noisy-le-Grand that the future President of the Republic had achieved his best score in the 1st round, with 29.17%.
In the second round, over the whole of Seine-Saint-Denis, Emmanuel Macron was very clearly ahead of Marine Le Pen (78.82% against 21.18%). Well above its national score: 66.10% against 33.90%
Participation will undoubtedly be one of the keys to this election. Seine-Saint-Denis is a department where average participation is consistently below the national level. During the 2017 presidential election, abstention had thus reached 27.5% (compared to 22.23 at the national level), with a peak in Clichy-sous-Bois (39.2%).
A candidate from 93, another grew up there
This Sunday, two of the twelve candidates have an important link with the department. A teacher at Le Corbusier high school in Aubervilliers, Nathalie Arthaud lives in Pantin, where the headquarters of her party (Lutte Ouvrière) is discreetly installed in the city center. It is also there, on the banks of the Ourcq canal, that she shot her campaign clip. Head of the list for the 2020 municipal elections in Pantin, she obtained 3.05% of the votes there.
Born in Montreuil, Éric Zemmour grew up in Drancy until the age of eight. The journalist and polemicist who became a candidate for the extreme right went there at the start of the campaign, at the end of October, surrounded by cameras during a very controversial trip, where the inhabitants hostile to his coming, had been required to the gap.