Outside the polling station in Evry-Courcouronnes, south of Paris, Adama Sy, a father and entrepreneur, described his disillusionment on the morning of Sunday, June 9, at finding his Senegalese origins still being thrown back in his face, more than 40 years after his birth in France. "I was born in France, I work in France, but, in the eyes of others, I'm still not French," he summed up, explaining that he had chosen to vote La France Insoumise (LFI, radical left) for the European elections, in order to keep hope alive for his children.
Outside the same polling station a little later, Rose Zagovian, 71, a retired nurse, explained that she was voting for Jordan Bardella, the lead candidate for the far-right Rassemblement National (RN), for the safety of her grandchildren and her first great-grandson. "When you see all the money we give to people who have never worked a day in their lives..." said the former left-wing voter, who nonetheless remembers crying on the evening of April 21, 2002, after Marine Le Pen's father Jean-Marie Le Pen qualified for the second round of the presidential election. These two voters perfectly encapsulated the country's divisions and transformations. And, on June 30 and July 7, along with all French voters, they will once again be called to the polls for the snap elections decided by President Emmanuel Macron.
Their division was matched by the shock that gripped both voters and politicians alike after the president announced the dissolution of the Assemblée Nationale on Sunday evening. "I'm stunned and worried, it's like playing Russian roulette," said the mayor of Evry-Courcouronnes, Stéphane Beaudet (formerly of right-wing Les Républicains, now without a party label). "Where I live, LFI and RN are reaching lunar proportions," (36.7% and 17% respectively), stressed the elected official, emphasizing how much, in his eyes, the two extremes converge in terms of their policies and methods, and how much these repel him. "The ceilings of the extremes have shattered," noted the mayor, in unison with other elected representatives, who emphasized the importance of the cumulative scores of LFI and RN in their territories.
'Punch in the gut '
"I won't choose between LFI and RN, if that's the scenario to come," proclaimed Xavier Lemoine, the right-wing mayor of Montfermeil, an eastern suburb of Paris. "With the legislative elections, it's going to make the debates even more hysterical. I don't know how we'll cope in our towns," said Lemoine, who has been in office since 2002 and was on the front line during the riots in autumn 2005. In Corbeil-Essonnes, south of Paris, where LFI obtained 34% of the vote, ahead of the RN with 24.2% of the vote, the left-wing mayor, Bruno Piriou, also described a fractured population: "I have a split town. The neighborhoods voted massively LFI, the central areas put Bardella in the lead. We need a huge rethink on the left, we have a huge responsibility, we need a complete reset. But how can we do that in three weeks?"
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