Is Marseille a left-wing city?
Every Monday, the New Scientific Society of Marseillology offers you 2,600 signs on the Agora of Marsactu to evoke the political, economic, social or cultural news of the city.
This week, a question between two rounds.
Melenchon at 31.12. 6.3 points more than in 2017. The leader of France Insoumise won Marseille, ahead of the outgoing President by 8.5 points. He totaled 108,423 votes against 92,555 in 2017. The deputy for the 4th constituency is the master of the city he is about to leave. What if, after all, it hadn’t become a left-wing city?
The municipality has been led by a PS-PCF-EELV and “civil society” coalition since 2020. If the campaign had been confused and the constitution of Printemps Marseille uncertain, clarification came with the light switch : the leaders of the parties, reviled yesterday, have regained control. The PS and its allies lead the dance, to the great displeasure of the Collectives, of the left of the left and of part of the citizen college returned to its dear studies. The current map of constituencies frozen in 2017 leaves a bare minimum to the allies of municipal power, but the left is in a good position to win the 3rd, 5th and 7th circo. at LREM and keep the 4th. And if the mandates of Jean-Claude Gaudin finally constituted only a parenthesis in the political history of a city which had hitherto known only socialism municipal – apart from the brief Gaullist experience between 1947 and 1953 and the communist interim tribunal at the Liberation?
Of course, this assumption is fragile. It overlooks the fact that although Mélenchon has won over Marseille, he achieves lower scores than in other regional capitals: 40.5% in Lille, 37% in Toulouse, 36.3% in Rennes, 33.1% in Nantes. A hypothesis, above all, which does not take into account the fact that Gaudin’s mandates lasted 25 years, a quarter of a century, a long eternity, especially towards the end. She does not say that the queen of Marseille is the president of the Metropolis and that she also holds the department. That the Region is right. Which state…. We will see the state later. She forgets that the question has no meaning because a city of this size is neither left-wing nor right-wing, just as it is neither rich nor poor. It is divided, that is all. This duality is its own: working-class neighborhoods that vote little or to the left, bourgeois neighborhoods that vote little or to the right.
And then, above all, what does “on the left” mean at the time of the irreconcilable ? The minute the far right knocks on the door of the Élysée Palace with a loud claim to represent the “popular” vote? The second the outgoing President holds a meeting trying to greenwash a second round and a few tens of kilometers away, his competitor makes the market in Pertuis? Left ? Which left?
Photo : Usul for @Mediapart