How can we explain the meteoric rise of the National Rally in Mayotte?

Before the disaster caused by Cyclone Chido, Mayotte was marked by multiple tensions: saturated health services, reduced access to water, overcrowded schools subject to student rotation, extraordinary delinquency, trafficking in “chemicals” (a mixture of tobacco and synthetic cannabinoids), police operations to secure tourist sites. The result is a Mahorese social life that seems impeded.

These elements are amplified by explosive demographics: the island's population has increased from 23,364 inhabitants in 1958 to 321,000 inhabitants in 2024. Those under 25 represent 60% of the population and experience levels of poverty, dropping out of school and particularly high unemployment. These young people in difficulty are divided into two unequal groups: French people and foreigners who, at best, only have access to odd jobs – at worst, unemployment or delinquency.

The migrant question

As part of the MIGRAF research project, we conducted surveys among the Mahorais on the issue of immigration to Mayotte. Since the 2000s, demonstrations against illegal immigration and blockades have multiplied and testify to the construction, for citizen groups, national media and parliamentary reports, of immigration as a public problem which would prevent economic and social development. from Mayotte. These tensions fuel the opposition between the Mahorais and migrants, who represent half of the population, and reveal an uneasy relationship with nationality.

The Mahorais with whom we spoke all expressed the same thing: “everything is crazy here”. They live in a daily life that they cannot explain. These remarks are intimately linked to the question of the other, of the stranger.

An otherness with variable geometry which depends on the tensions and hierarchies of the moment has been put in place: sometimes it is the presence of the African who is considered problematic, sometimes that of the Congolese (or the Somali), without however coming totally eclipse that of the Comorian (95% of foreigners are Comorians), and particularly of the Anjouanese (inhabitant of the island of Anjouan, part of the Comoros archipelago). The use of the definite article rather than the plural article to define a population is omnipresent in our interviews. This figure of the other, of the foreigner, becomes the source of fixation and hierarchy producing violence and stigmatization.

This reconfiguration of ethnic borders, despite the persistence of moral economies, family or friendly ties between “Mahorais” and “Comorians”, between “Mahorais” and “Africans”, finds its source in the establishment of a national border and European Union, the political partition of the archipelago, and the simultaneous concern of the Mahorais about their integration into the French nation-state.

This concern is amplified by the unfortunate comments of François Bayrou evoking an island outside the “national territory”or those of President Macron declaring “If it wasn’t France, you would be 10,000 times more in trouble!” –words which create a distance (political, institutional and symbolic) and which validate the hypothesis of a “colony department”.

Other mechanisms reinforce this production of irreducible otherness, like the social role of gossip and rumors in the creation of an identity through difference reinforcing the them/us couple. This is for example the case, given the territorial claims of the Comoros on Mayotte since 1974, discourses which convey the idea that migratory flows from the Comoros can be mobilized as a geopolitical tool of destabilization. According to these speeches, the French state would allow the replacement of the population to satisfy the territorial claims of the Comoros on Mayotte.

“Deracialization” of the RN’s discourse

Traveling on the island in April 2024, Marine Le Pen made the installation of African migrants in the street the symbol of «chaos» Who “threats Mayotte with a danger of death”. In Mayotte, the National Rally (RN) made a spectacular leap. It rose, in the first round of the presidential election, from 2.7% in 2012, to 42.6% in 2017. In 2022, Mayotte is the department where the National Rally achieved its biggest score in the first round of the presidential election, with 42.89% of the votes.

This meteoric rise must be linked to a strategy of deracialization and demonization of the political discourse of the RN in Overseas. In the archipelago, it is not a question for the far-right party to castigate Islam (95% of Mahorais say they are Muslims), but the presence of Comorians and even Africans.

This migratory presence is, however, a necessary element for the social functioning of the island, particularly in the sectors of construction, agriculture, domestic employment or in that of mobility with motorcycle taxis, whose drivers are all Africans from the continent in an irregular situation on the territory. The migratory presence, described as the source of all the island's ills, is in reality a resource making it possible to compensate for the failures of public policies. An ambiguous situation follows which evokes a “racism without race” and the “narcissism of small differences”.

Associations have gradually been formed to put an end to the phenomenon of illegal immigration, like the “collective of citizens of Mayotte 2018”, created following the social movement of 2018. Its president, Safina Soula, denounces the flaws of the 101^e French department, namely immigration, insecurity, education, and finally the cost of living. The very active popular protest movement calls for a joint strengthening of the fight against illegal immigration and against growing insecurity – obviously making the link between the two.

But reducing all the causes of the island's misfortunes to the question of migration and identity, now newly embodied by the African migrant, leads to the social and economic question being made invisible.

Postcolonial situation

As is often the case in a postcolonial situation, everything happens as if the territory, initially historically conceived as having to generate resources, should not cost the metropolis. Thus, departmentalization has largely remained incomplete with under-resourced public services, significant deficits in education and training structures and reduced rights.

In Mayotte, exceptions are legion. Migration policy is based on systematic expulsions, legal (confinement of minors in administrative detention centers) and social (state medical aid and universal health protection do not apply to Mayotte) precariousness. Social rights are also reduced: the minimum wage and the RSA, for example, are much lower than those in mainland France.

We can certainly perceive Mayotte as a territory of exceptional policies linked to migratory flows, hostage to identity questions amplified by the national political game. But despite this grim observation, is it not possible to conceive of Mayotte as a place where projects could be deployed (in terms of housing, the environment, social policies, new cooperation), social solutions, economic and environmental, in a positive way? To do this, we should seize the crises that the department is going through as an opportunity to rethink many of the challenges of the 21st century.^e century and get rid of the idea that the island can only be saved from the outside, like the presidential promise of a long airport runway.

Anthony Goreau-Ponceaud is a geographer, teacher-researcher assigned to the LAM laboratory (UMR 5115) at the University of Bordeaux. Olivier Chadoin is professor of sociology at ENSAP Bordeaux.

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