In front of a school in the Cité des Oliviers, in the north of Marseille, “we have never seen a queue like that to vote, and so much the better,” smiles the president of the office. In impoverished neighborhoods, the “anxiety” of the RN boosted participation.
At the Oliviers, abstention had approached 65% three weeks ago during the European elections, significantly more than the 48.51% at the national level. Kaoutara, just 18 years old, had not moved: “I hadn’t taken it seriously but now, the more I see the news, the more I see that it is serious”, slips the young woman, abaya and blue veil, who refuses to give his last name.
“As long as we have a choice, it would be better to go and vote,” says Nabil Agueni, 40, as he leaves the office located at the foot of the Castellane estate, where football legend Zinedine Zidane grew up. He had also skipped the previous election: “I came to counter the FN (now the National Rally, Editor’s note) because it is going to take away all aid. The country needs help, we are not all equal.”
Inès Daoud voted for the first time at 19, with her mother Ouahiba. “Honestly, we don’t want the RN. We don’t have a specific party, but in the family there is a mix, from Algeria, the Comoros, Morocco,” Ouahiba says.
“The possibility of the extreme right worries me because we are in a working-class, cosmopolitan city and it could disrupt the ‘good life’ we have here. We risk the release of racist speech in public services “, fears for his part Jean-François Pepin, 49 years old, specialized educator who came to vote with his family in the 3rd, a more central district but with pockets of poverty among the worst in Europe.
– “Meet us!” –
“Racist speech has been released on social networks with lots of phrases like ‘Go home!’, so if the extreme right comes to power, I’m afraid it will be released even more everywhere and that we will be mistreated,” confides Anissa Hamadi, 26, who has “spoken a lot to convince other people to go and vote.”
Ms. Hamadi also invites people from smaller towns and the media not to “caricature” her neighborhood. “When people talk about our district, they say that ‘it’s not very famous, that there are only thugs’, I want to tell them ‘Come see us, meet us before judging’. I am the daughter of Comorian immigrants, I am an aeronautical logistics engineer!”
On this subject, the largest Olympique de Marseille supporters’ club, the South Winners, appealed to the 80,000 or so Marseillais who voted for Jordan Bardella in the European elections because “the situation is serious”. And to recall that the “successive waves of immigration have created the people of Marseille and their cosmopolitan identity”.
Hallidji Aboubacer leaves the polling station at the Saint-Just Corot school, which adjoins a degraded condominium. He is proud to announce that for once his children will also come to vote, because “in terms of the economic and social situation, it is very worrying”.
“I knew who I wouldn’t vote for, but not who I was going to vote for. I took a ballot paper with a young person on it,” adds this 55-year-old professional integration advisor.
– “Is this an RN MP here?” –
In these constituencies, the outgoing deputies are two LFI, Manuel Bompard, party coordinator, and Sébastien Delogu, who brandished a Palestinian flag in the National Assembly, or the very discreet Gisèle Lelouis of the RN. Many of those interviewed do not know them.
“Ah, is she an RN deputy here? I didn’t know. The RN vote, I can’t understand,” explains Abdallah Saïdi. However, this 35-year-old self-employed person will vote blank, as usual.
“For the moment, there are no convincing elected officials” and LFI, which scored more than 72% in the European elections in its office, does not excite him. “They come with a kind of propaganda about Palestine, it obviously concerns me what is happening in Gaza, we are human, but to help them you must first help yourself. And here, we don’t there is not enough infrastructure. There is nothing, just a community center where seniors play the lottery.
And for Karim, who does not wish to give his name, there are “of course North Africans and blacks who vote RN in this district, but not out of conviction, because they want change”.
san-iw/ol/gvy
