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For many in Marseille, the far right in France’s second city will be for ever associated with the killing of Ibrahim Ali.
In 1995, the teenager was leaving a rap band rehearsal with friends when they crossed paths with three National Front militants who were putting up posters in support of the Front’s founder and then leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen. Ibrahim was shot in the back as he ran to catch his bus. Thirty-one years later, the National Front is now Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) and polls suggest the party could take Marseille in forthcoming nationwide municipal elections. The first of two voting rounds is scheduled for 15 March.
The RN candidate, Franck Allisio, is tied in first place with the incumbent socialist mayor, Benoît Payan. For months, polling has shown that nearly one in three in this city of 880,000 inhabitants plan to cast their ballot for the National Rally, a figure 10 points higher than at the last local elections here in 2020. The prospect of a far-right mayor has gripped Marseillais since late last year. Whenever the local football team Olympique de Marseille have played a home game in recent months, fans have made their opposition to the far right clear in chants and banners.
The question of how the far right has grown so powerful in one of France’s most diverse cities, a sun-bleached place shaped by centuries of immigration and a proud working-class identity, also says something about its rise across the country. Here, as in other parts of France, the far-right candidate has a background in the mainstream right, blurring the lines between the two. Here, too, the far right has expanded into what were once leftwing constituencies. Here, too, the local left is bitterly divided, with the candidate from the radical La France Insoumise party attacking Payan more than he skewers the far right.
Given the far right has never seized a major French metropolis, this will be the most closely watched municipal election in the country. RN leaders, including the party’s 30-year-old president, Jordan Bardella, know that winning Marseille would be both highly symbolic and augur well for the party’s chances in France’s presidential elections next year.
Since 2020, Marseille has been ruled by a Green-left alliance known as Marseille Spring. It delivered the city’s first female mayor (who was later replaced by Payan) and challenged the clientelist system that had dominated local politics for decades.
Key to Marseille Spring’s victory were the votes of the so-called néo-Marseillais, the newer, left-leaning residents who have moved to the city from other parts of France and Europe over the past decade. Having lived here for almost as long, I have observed the influx of creatives lured by cheaper rents but also the gentrification debates that have followed their arrival.
Marseille Spring’s six years in power have coincided, too, with the city’s reinvention as a hip tourist destination. Many visitors have been drawn by its Mediterranean lifestyle, but for others the attraction is the progressive politics espoused by Payan’s city hall.
If your experience of Marseille is limited to certain multicultural central neighbourhoods where the city’s vibrant social activism milieu is most evident, then it might be easy to assume that this is – and always will be – a leftwing city, an outlier in the far-right bastion that is the wider south of France.
But Marseille’s politics have always been contested. The rightwing Jean-Claude Gaudin was mayor for 25 years and the far right in the form of the National Front has had a foothold here since the 1980s. Beyond the city centre, the far right has been expanding in recent years, particularly in villages long swallowed by urban sprawl. In some of these areas, the Communist vote has been usurped by RN. Tellingly, calls for a street to be renamed after Ibrahim Ali were long ignored by Gaudin but acted upon by Payan a year after he took office.
For many voters here, Marseille-born Allisio doesn’t fit the caricature of the far-right candidate – and this is what his party is counting on. Once an adviser to former president Nicolas Sarkozy, he joined Le Pen’s party in 2015. He describes his story – as the son of parents with Italian roots who moved to France after years in Tunisia – as one that embodies Marseille’s diversity. His organising committee includes people of north African Muslim and Jewish heritage. A striking aspect of RN’s growth in Marseille – home to France’s second-largest Muslim and Jewish populations after Paris – is the support it has built among Jewish voters, partly by taking pro-Israel positions. Most importantly, Allisio speaks more about crime than immigration, even if many of his supporters conflate the two.
Polls show that law and order ranks among voters’ primary concerns here and candidates have been pitching different solutions to the drug-related gang violence that has plagued the city’s hardscrabble northern districts for decades. The city was shaken by the killing last November of the younger brother of anti-drugs campaigner Amine Kessaci, in what authorities believe was an act of intimidation.
Allisio has promised to triple the number of police officers and double the number of CCTV cameras – and he has called for a state of emergency to tackle drug traffickers. Controversially, he has also proposed the introduction of a pass – which locals were quick to dub the “anti-scum pass” – limiting access to certain beaches to families and elderly people.
Payan’s campaign for re-election received a boost when Kessaci joined his team, warning about the risks of a far-right victory in a city where many have generations-old north African origins. But as candidates enter the final days of campaigning ahead of Sunday’s first round, trepidation over the possibility of a far-right win has heightened.
So far the mainstream conservative party, Les Républicains, has refused to consider a second-round alliance with Allisio that would sweep the far right into city hall – but that might change. And on the left, it looks unlikely that squabbling factions will unite as they did nationally to keep Le Pen’s party out of power in 2024. When he visited Marseille last weekend in a last push for his party’s candidate, Bardella seemed confident, even if his posters are regularly defaced in the city centre.
Payan told Libération this week that it would be an “earthquake” if RN takes France’s second-largest metropolis. Few here, in what locals refer to as Planète Mars, would argue with that. If Marseille tips into the hands of the far right, the tremors will be felt far beyond the city and far beyond France.
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Mary Fitzgerald is a journalist and writer based in Marseille
