They could be the lifeline of the left. They are the stock in trade of the right. Whether courted or singled out, neighborhood residents are at the heart of the presidential campaign. Abstentionists, formerly won over to the socialists, they are part of this popular electorate that the left seeks to win back without being able to make itself heard, and the right uses them as foils, reducing them to delinquents “wild”, immigrants “invaders” and Muslims to the practices “incompatible” with the Republic.
In the eyes of the candidates Valérie Pécresse (Les Républicains), Marine Le Pen (National Rally) and Eric Zemmour (Reconquest!), the cities are above all territories where one does not vote. In the priority neighborhoods of city policy – there are just over 1,500 and have around 5.5 million inhabitants – the rate of abstention is indeed reaching record highs. During the regional and departmental elections of June 2021, it exceeded 85% in certain sectors. As a result, suitors from the right rarely address them and “choose the strategy of the scapegoat”, deplores Driss Ettazaoui, boss of the MoDem of Eure, deputy mayor of Evreux and founding president of the Association of elected officials of France (AEF).
This transpartisan group of 180 elected officials created in January 2021 signs a forum and a video on January 28 on the site Actu.fr in which its members denounce the “warmth” responses to the “dangerous drift” speeches “populists” and call for a burst of “living forces” from the country, “Democrats and Progressives”. “How, little by little, did the identitarians take control of the public debate in the deafening silence of the humanists? », they wonder. “Artists, intellectuals or politicians, not many people dare to step up, comments Mr. Ettazoui. Insults, threats, denigration… The debates are violent, the consequences on our lives very harsh. »
Security one-upmanship
In a press release dated January 27, the association of City and Suburb mayors, which is finalizing the establishment of a platform intended to challenge candidates and submit proposals to them, also expressed its “all the more serious concern that on the eve of the presidential election, the subjects of inequality, poverty, poor housing, remain largely invisible and erased from campaign themes by the omnipresence of the question of identity and an overbidding of certain candidates in the stigmatization of working-class neighborhoods”.
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