The metropolitan vote and its fractures: the example of Montpellier

How can we decipher the map of communes that placed Jean-Luc Mélenchon first in the first round of the presidential election? The Insoumis candidate's strong results, particularly in working-class neighborhoods - 93% in Seine-Saint-Denis, for example, as well as in other regions - question the way major metropolises reacted to the elections, and illustrate a deep political divide that civic and political action can analyze.

Emmanuel Négrier, University of MontpellierJean-Paul Volle, University of MontpellierJulien Audemard and Stéphane Coursière, University of Montpellier

Jean-Luc Mélenchon - Livre Paris 2017 - Flickr

A city like Montpellier emerged as the leading metropolis in France for the Jean-Luc Mélenchon vote. The France Insoumise candidate won 40.7% of the votes cast. By way of comparison, I in the other metropolises where he came out on top, Jean-Luc Mélenchon reached 31.1% in Marseille, 33.1% in Nantes, 35.5% in Strasbourg, 36.9% in Toulouse and 40.5% in Lille, the only other metropolis where his score was close to that achieved in Montpellier.

The city's sociological identity

The Mélenchon vote can first be explained by the sociological identity of the city of Montpellier, with its poverty rate of 27% according to Insee in 2019, almost double the national average, which resonates with the social dimension claimed by the candidate.

The 1ᵉʳ round of the 2022 presidential elections in the Montpellier region (candidate who came out on top in the commune).
Author provided

This observation is reinforced by an examination of the votes at each polling station. While it's true that voters in working-class neighborhoods voted less than the average - there are sometimes 20-point gaps between the neighborhoods where people vote the least and the more middle-class neighborhoods where they vote the most - their mobilization exceeded expectations, with turnout above 50% in most cases.

In these neighborhoods, Jean-Luc Mélenchon is hegemonic. For example, he won 77% of the vote in the emblematic Petit Bard district, with a 63% turnout. This initial observation is backed up by the fact that the youth vote held up unexpectedly well during the election. Given Jean-Luc Mélenchon's considerable share of the 18-34 age group, it is logical to deduce that he is in a strong position in the young capital of Hérault.

Effective mediation

However, these variables are in no way specific to Montpellier, and hardly explain the increased support for the city. On the one hand, the city's urban policy districts were the focus of intense mobilization efforts during the campaign. There's nothing automatic about the proximity between a real-life situation and a program. To become a motivating factor, it's necessary to develop a whole range of mediation activities, particularly at local level, which have borne fruit here.

In addition to its work in the neighborhoods, the Melenchon campaign has drawn on considerable resources: the meeting at the Arena in Montpellier on February 13, 2022 (attended by around 8,000 people) was accompanied by a significant physical and symbolic presence in the public arena.

This hyper-presence has legitimized in Montpellier, perhaps more obviously than elsewhere, the path of the "useful" vote for a left-wing electorate far more composite than the France Insoumise label and program imply. With 40.7% of the vote on April 10, 2022, it almost reaches the total left-wing vote of the 2017 presidential election. While the mayor, Michael Delafosse, had taken up the cause of Anne Hidalgo, she garnered just 2.3% of the vote, a score admittedly better than her national average, but calamitous all the same.

A different reality in Hérault

But the map shows us another reality, beyond the city limits of Montpellier. Still in the Hérault region, Jean-Luc Mélenchon also came out on top in three nearby communes: Grabels, whose mayor René Revol has long been close to the candidate, and where he reached almost 30%; Juvignac, a town long typical of a national vote, where a new population of young tenants has recently settled; Murviel-lès-Montpellier, more out of the way, governed by an ecologist left, and marked by important fights in this direction in the past and more recently.

Sociologically, we're not in LFI's urban, young, working-class target group.

There are three reasons for the Mélenchon phenomenon as a whole: the generalization of the useful left-wing vote in his favor; the existence of objective conditions that make the path more obvious than elsewhere; and the mobilization of grassroots players.

These factors also explain why the Mélenchon vote appears fairly homogeneous across social classes. This is the big difference with the Le Pen vote. Its penetration of the upper classes - as can be seen from its success in some of Montpellier's nicer neighborhoods - goes hand in hand with a strong impact in working-class neighborhoods and even in communes far from the capital, as can be seen on the map to the north. Three territories, three sociologies that explain Jean-Luc Mélenchon LFI's electoral prowess.

A clear electoral geography

Three territories, this time for three candidates, is also what the map of the leading candidates in the communes of the Montpellier urban area shows. Alongside the Mélenchon vote, the Macron and Le Pen votes form a clear electoral geography.

The President of the Republic came out on top in almost all the communes on the outskirts of Montpellier and further north. Marine Le Pen's areas of strength are mainly to the south and east of the city, in the communes along the Mediterranean coast. These communes are home to a predominantly elderly electorate of small property owners, where the right-wing vote, and in particular the Rassemblement National, is deeply entrenched. The very high correlation (R=0.90) between Marine Le Pen's scores in the first round of the 2017 and 2022 presidential elections in the communes of the Montpellier urban area reveals the great stability of the far-right candidate's areas of strength.

At the other end of the spectrum, in the communes of the inner suburbs, there is a mix of affluent, home-owning, long-established voters and younger voters living in collective housing recently built to accommodate the metropolis' expanding population.

An internal divide within these communes

The profile of these electorates corresponds well to what we know about the sociology of the Macron vote. Analysis of the map also reveals an internal divide within these communes. While towns to the north of Montpellier, in its direct periphery, put Jean-Luc Mélenchon in second place, Marine Le Pen overtakes him the further you move away from the regional capital.

These areas overlap with the flow of first-time buyers who can no longer afford to live in the capital or its inner suburbs.

Behind this divide, we can also observe the influence of local political dominance. Emmanuel Macron achieved high scores in communes that have long been run by the right, such as Castelnau-le-Lez - a town where the former mayor, LR senator Jean-Pierre Grand, came out in his favor.

La Grande-Motte, where mayor Stéphan Rossignol is president of the Hérault LR federation and a supporter of Valérie Pécresse, is the only town on the Montpellier coast to place the incumbent president ahead of Marine Le Pen. Like Jean-Luc Mélenchon on the left, Emmanuel Macron undoubtedly benefits from the "useful" vote on the right: the correlation of his scores with those of François Fillon in the first round of the last presidential election seems to confirm this idea (R=0.55).

Although he remains weak in Montpellier, Emmanuel Macron is nonetheless taking advantage of the reconfiguration of the right-wing vote to make headway among voters in Montpellier's affluent suburbs. Of the three leading candidates, he is the one whose scores are rising in the greatest number of towns in the Montpellier urban area.

Our dual social and political focus therefore invalidates two complacent theories about the urban vote: that left-wing and right-wing populism are both directed at the same electorate, and that the peripheral vote is geographically homogeneous.

If we can see that the Mélenchon vote does not occupy the same areas of strength as the Le Pen vote, it's because they are sociologically and politically distinct.

The other lesson, valid in Montpellier as in other metropolises, is the abyssal gap between national politics and territorial politics, for the most part governed by parties in disarray.The Conversation

Emmanuel Négrier, CNRS Research Director in Political Science at CEPEL, University of Montpellier, University of MontpellierJean-Paul Volle, Professor emeritus, University of MontpellierJulien Audemard, Associate research scientist and Stéphane Coursière, Research engineer, cartographer, CEPEL, University of Montpellier

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.