In Perpignan, the National Rally has also won over the middle class

[The Conversation] - Published on July 3, 2020 in Science and Society

Louis Aliot’s victory in Perpignan is notable not only for the city’s size (121,681 residents). In fact, the head-to-head victory (against the incumbent mayor Jean-Marc Pujol of Les Républicains) in the second round is exceptional for the National Rally (RN): in 2014, only Cogolin (Var) had been won in this manner, also against a right-wing slate.

Nicolas Lebourg, University of Montpellier

However, winning this contest requires forging a temporary alliance among citizens with divergent socioeconomic interests. The RN is typically strong among the working class but significantly weaker in other social sectors: in the recent European elections, it received 40% of the vote from blue-collar workers and 30% from households living on less than 1,200 euros a month (while La République en Marche received only 11% in those same groups).

The capture of Perpignan is therefore particularly significant as an example of a successful merger of the right-wing parties, achieved by reaching beyond the popular base of Le Penism.

The support of the affluent classes

As early as 2014, the list led by Louis Aliot had achieved notable success in Perpignan’s affluent neighborhoods. At polling station No. 52, located in the Mas LLaro neighborhood—an area of villas with secure swimming pools on the eastern edge of the city, known for its affluence and lack of ethnic or social diversity—his share of the vote was 50.6%.

Had another sociological factor shifted the vote further to the right, the result could have been even more significant: in the residential neighborhood of Las Cobas, polling station No. 48—which had 10.6% of Pied-Noirs on its voter rolls (based on dates and places of birth)—voted for Aliot at a rate of 55.4%, while their less affluent counterparts in the Moulin à Vent neighborhood voted for Le Pen with less enthusiasm.

An appealing liberal argument

Cross-referencing the FN’s membership database, the price per square meter at polling stations, and the comparative results of Marine Le Pen and Louis Aliot sheds light on one particular point:

It is clear that Louis Aliot has a local advantage—an advantage that his opponents Jean-Marc Pujol and Romain Grau (LREM) continued to deny throughout the 2020 campaign.

The downwardly mobile middle class provides the bulk of the party’s activists and does indeed help normalize the party’s presence: its vote share is correlated with this demographic. However, in the wealthiest segment, the picture is different: while District 52 has no activists, “Aliotism” does have a solid base there, albeit with less room for growth than in the middle class.

The political cost of direct involvement with the FN (through membership) was still too high, though this did not prevent people from sharing its views.

In 2020, by recruiting prominent figures from the right, emphasizing the themes of security and restoring prosperity, and adopting a liberal stance that stood in stark contrast to Marine Le Pen’s, Louis Aliot came out on top, successfully uniting both the working class and the affluent.

A new champion

In short, Louis Aliot’s list and campaign to gain prominence among the higher socioeconomic classes played the same role that activists play in less affluent communities. This shift is not limited to the party itself, as evidenced by the change in the percentage of votes received by Mas Llaro (polling station 711, following the redistricting of polling stations):

This Fillon-supporting electorate, which had overwhelmingly backed Emmanuel Macron in the second round of the presidential election, remained loyal to LREM in the European elections but returned to its pro-Aliot stance in 2020.

Here we have a “law-and-order” faction on the right that is looking for a leader. It does not consider the National Rally’s platform credible, deeming it too anti-business, but nevertheless sees Louis Aliot as the political figure who can deliver cultural conservatism, security and ethnic order, and economic liberalism.

What we are seeing is a merger of right-wing factions, demonstrating that the decision by three running mates from Romain Grau’s list to join Louis Aliot’s camp between the two rounds of voting is not merely a matter of personal choice, but rather reflects the convergence of a political platform and social demand.

A Concrete Plan for Safety

Once elected, Louis Aliot announced that he would take direct charge of the issue of public safety. This issue has always been central to all of the National Front’s municipal campaigns in Perpignan, but this was the first time the party presented a concrete platform, outlining a series of specific measures. While the city saw a significant decline in non-violent thefts during the previous term, crimes against persons continue to rise, particularly assaults, which have increased by 24.4% since 2013.

In January 2020, an IFOP-Semaine du Roussillon-Sud Radio poll showed that 48% of Perpignan voters surveyed considered “the safety of people and property” to be a key factor in their voting decision.

Take, for example, the western neighborhood of Bas Vernet, a modest area among the city’s priority neighborhoods, which does indeed face real safety issues, particularly in the Cité des Oiseaux sector.

61% of residents in Bas Vernet Ouest considered safety to be an important factor in their voting decision. And, indeed, the corresponding polling station gave 61.65% of its votes to Louis Aliot in the second round.

A convergence between working-class and affluent neighborhoods

Les Oiseaux and Mas Llaro, though socially so different, thus converged in the top three pro-Aliot polling stations. While Marine Le Pen defeated Emmanuel Macron in only one polling station in Perpignan during the second round of the presidential election, this convergence made it possible to build a political majority.

But this did not happen without divisions within the working class. Indeed, the city has poor neighborhoods with a high concentration of people from the southern shores of the Mediterranean—particularly in the run-down historic center and in the northern neighborhoods.

In 2014, it was voters of North African descent who saved the incumbent mayor. Although they typically vote for the left, they rallied behind the right-wing mayor in the first round and turned out in even greater numbers in the second.

The 2020 campaign was thus structured around a strategy designed to navigate this demographic landscape. Jean-Marc Pujol’s teams did everything they could to mobilize the northern neighborhoods and their residents of North African descent. Louis Aliot, for his part, took care not to scare them off.

Although he launched his campaign with the support of Éric Zemmour in a hall packed with a very “bourgeois” audience, he subsequently took great care to avoid the topics of Islam and immigration.

In the housing projects, mobilization is no longer enough

The election results can be illustrated by the example of the polling station in the Cité Clodion.

With the highest percentage of Arab-Muslim names on its voter rolls in the entire city (54.4%) and just one registered National Front member, the district gave Jean-Marc Pujol his best result of 2014 (44.4%) and his biggest gain in the second round (up 34.7 percentage points).

In 2020, the party’s new district office saw its share of the vote increase by 13 percentage points in the second round, with Louis Aliot securing a minimum of 20.45% there. The momentum was significant… but not enough, as it was too concentrated in a specific area: most working-class neighborhoods were not sufficiently mobilized by the presence of a gentrified RN candidate.

The issue can actually be understood by comparing three maps:

• the distribution of votes for Aliot in the second round of 2014, broken down by the main working-class neighborhoods
• the proportion of Arab-Muslim first names and the presence of Muslim places of worship, both studies conducted by geographer Sylvain Manternach
• the Aliot vote published by the regional daily L’Indépendant the day after the second round in 2020.

The picture that emerges is the opposite of that painted by proponents of the “peripheral France” thesis.

The RN vote did not emerge in working-class neighborhoods as a result of multicultural society, but rather on the outskirts of those neighborhoods, peaking in affluent areas, in opposition to a multiethnic society perceived as responsible for financial waste and insecurity; meanwhile, the collapse of the patronage system has alienated working-class areas and prevented a surge in voter turnout this time around.

Insiders and outsiders

A natural objection to our argument would be that the shifts in voter behavior are a result of the voting conditions brought about by the coronavirus crisis and an excessively long interval between the two rounds of voting, which demobilized entire segments of the electorate, as political scientist Céline Braconnier demonstrates. We can show that the issue is structural by examining a few diagrams.

Half of Perpignan’s electorate consists of people born in the department, while the other half comes from other departments in mainland France. In the everyday vocabulary of Perpignan, this difference is summed up as “Catalans” versus “Gavatx”—those “of the land” and those who came from beyond the village of Salses. These “outsiders,” as non-native Perpignan residents are often called, tend to live in the affluent neighborhoods:

As we demonstrated, along with Jérôme Fourquet and Sylvain Manternach, in our study on the city for the Citizenship Chair at Sciences Po Saint-Germain-en-Laye, these immigrants vote significantly more liberally than native-born citizens:

However, it turns out that these individuals—who are more integrated into the economic system and less so into the local sociocultural system—were more active in the municipal elections.

If we look at the election results by ranking polling places by voter turnout:

Since we are classifying the districts by percentage of foreign-born residents:

It appears that the Aliot ticket initially suffered in the first round from a lack of turnout among the local electorate that typically supports it. Although he nearly doubled Jean-Marc Pujol’s vote total, this figure masks a distinct trend of abstention against him, due to the greater civic engagement of immigrants, who are less likely to vote for the National Rally and more likely to turn out at the polls.

Admittedly, the return of first-time voters in the second round allowed Louis Aliot to gain additional votes, but he also owes his victory to the segment of the liberal-conservative electorate from mainland France that has now turned to him, contrary to previous trends.

There has indeed been a convergence of the right-wing parties in Perpignan—ideologically, sociologically, and electorally. The convergence of the local working class and the affluent metropolitan classes is building a social bloc that is likely to carry weight in the National Rally’s near future, since in previous departmental and regional elections it achieved excellent results in the first round by capturing the working-class vote, but was unable to attract enough additional support to secure a majority in the second round. The victory in Perpignan is no accident, and the possibility of a path to break the National Rally’s isolation has been raised.

Nicolas Lebourg, Researcher at CEPEL (CNRS-University of Montpellier), University of Montpellier

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Readthe original article.

Keywords: History, Politics, Company