When video games maker Ubisoft was scouting for a location for a new studio, executive Julien Mayeux pushed for the booming city of Bordeaux in south-west France because he knew it would be easy to recruit there.
“Bordeaux came out on top when we asked our employees where they wanted us to go”, he said of France’s fifth biggest urban area, which boasts fine weather, cheaper housing than Paris and a thriving tech scene. Mayeux now runs an office staffed by about 400 engineers and game designers in a trendy revitalised port neighbourhood.
Just over an hour away by car or train, Sainte-Foy-la-Grande could not be more different. The small medieval town on the Dordogne river once prospered in an economy anchored by wine production, but is now one of the poorest communes of mainland France.
As jobs dried up and shops closed, the centre became marred by roughly 400 vacant or dilapidated buildings. Slumlords rent cheap rooms to migrant workers and welfare recipients who cannot afford anywhere else. Almost half the population of 2,600 live in poverty and unemployment is about five times the national average.
Sainte-Foy-la-Grande, outside prosperous Bordeaux, is one of France's poorest communes
“We are fighting to save Sainte-Foy”, said Christelle Guionie, a former teacher who was elected mayor with the Socialist party in 2020.
These two extremes in the French department of Gironde illustrate the reality of France today as voters prepare to choose their next president on April 24: the country is riven by deep territorial fractures between the places where people are doing well, led by the urban centres and attractive tourist zones, and the places where they are not, including small towns and rural areas as well as poor suburbs.
Far-right candidate Marine Le Pen has put winning over rural working-class voters in what she calls the “forgotten France” at the centre of her second attempt to beat incumbent Emmanuel Macron. Focusing largely on cost of living issues, she has campaigned almost exclusively outside big cities with small rallies and visits to local markets, painting Macron as an out-of-touch elitist who does not understand people’s daily struggles.
Although the centralisation of power and wealth within Paris often gets blamed for inequality with the provinces, similar scenarios are being reproduced all over the country. Mid-sized cities such as Bordeaux, Lyon, Toulouse and Nantes have enjoyed more than a decade of demographic and economic growth, often at the expense of their environs.
The reasons are multiple: like in many other large western economies, the economic forces unleashed by globalisation have gutted France’s industrial and agricultural base and replaced them with a services and tourism-based economy that favours cities and well-educated workers.
The department of Gironde is emblematic of the “new organisation of the territory”, says Jérôme Fourquet, a political analyst and author of the influential book The French Archipelago. Proximity to an urban centre or an attractive tourist zone now determines much about people’s worldview and economic status, he says, and thus affects how they vote.
In 2017, people who lived closer to cities or with better connections to them by rail, voted overwhelmingly for Macron over Le Pen, according to his research. “Voting patterns today are no longer determined by the choice between the traditional parties of the left and right, which for decades used to represent secular and catholic France respectively”, he says. “Geography has become the dividing line of the new France”.
Le Pen's core voters live in poor rural areas and rely on cars
It’s a divide Le Pen is seeking to exploit. When the Rassemblement National candidate came to Gironde in late March, she did not stop in Bordeaux before heading north to hold a rally in Saint-Martin-Lacaussade, a town with a population of 1,061, surrounded by vineyards.
It was a calculated decision. People close to her campaign said her strategy had been to reactivate a class-based vote by opposing the “elite bloc” who back Macron with her “popular bloc”.
The emphasis on rural areas also dovetails with Le Pen’s anti-immigration stance since most of the foreign-born in France live concentrated around Paris and other cities.
In a municipal gym festooned with flags, an audience of RN supporters applauded her promise to stop “sacrificing farmers on the altar of free trade” and to end “absurd” energy policies dictated by Brussels.
Calling for “de-metropolisation”, Le Pen said she would put a stop to policies that cause rural areas “to be vampirised by the cities”.
“That is the justice I will return to you, here in the forgotten territories of France”, she said.
The message hit home with Jean-Luc Broussat, a retired farmer who drove two hours from his home south of Bordeaux to hear Le Pen speak. “There are no more doctors near where we live, so my wife has to drive an hour to get proper care for her heart condition”, he says. “And it’s getting harder and harder to make a decent living from farming. If she wins, Marine will do something for us”.
The crescent of poverty
The wealth in Gironde is concentrated in Bordeaux and the ring of commuter communities it supports, as well as along the Atlantic coast in places such as Cap Ferret and Arcachon, where the affluent and retirees have beach homes.
Saint-Martin-Lacaussade, by contrast, sits in what officials refer to as the “crescent of poverty” that arcs from the Médoc wine region in the north through Sainte-Foy-La Grande to the south-east edge of the department. It includes towns that lend their names to some of France’s most expensive wines such as Saint-Estèphe and Saint-Julien. But while tourists flock to the billionaire-owned Château Latour or Château Lafite Rothschild nearby, the towns resemble empty husks.
In Pauillac, where Le Pen won the most votes in this year’s first round and in 2017, life-sized trompe l’oeil decals have been plastered on vacant shop windows to make it look as if art galleries and food shops line the streets.
Residents of these rural areas and small towns have felt increasingly abandoned as local commerce shrivelled and public services such as hospitals, courts and local train stations closed. That has translated into a growing vote for the far right and the far left, as well as rising abstention rates.
Together, Le Pen, her far-right rival Éric Zemmour and anti-capitalist leftwinger Jean-Luc Mélenchon racked up 50 per cent to 70 per cent of votes in the “crescent of poverty”. The far-right actually gained support in these poor areas compared to the 2017 election, while Mélenchon’s share declined slightly.
The far left performed strongest in urban and semi rural areas
In the more prosperous parts of Gironde, the patterns differed. In Bordeaux, voters backed Macron with 33 per cent in the first round, Mélenchon with 29 per cent, Le Pen with only 8 per cent and Zemmour 7 per cent. Along the coast in Arcachon, it was 40 per cent for Macron, 28 per cent for Le Pen and Zemmour combined, and only 9 per cent for Mélenchon.
Geography is not the only factor in these results, says Mathieu Gallard of pollster Ipsos, who says voters’ level of optimism also plays into their choice. The 43 per cent who are very satisfied with their lives choose Macron, while the 46 per cent who are very dissatisfied back Le Pen. The “somewhat dissatisfied”, about 37 per cent, support Mélenchon.
More or less absent were the two political movements that gave France its presidents from 1958 until 2017 — the Gaullist centre-right, today called Les Républicains party, and the Socialists. Both were atomised after Macron swept to power with a new political party and a pledge to modernise France by governing from “neither right nor left” — between them, nationally, they received less than 7 per cent of the first round vote this time.
The political landscape of this election confirmed three forces: the far-right with Le Pen and Zemmour, the centre with Macron, and the radical left with Mélenchon. Although only Macron and Le Pen made the run-off, the choices of Mélenchon voters will be key to determining the winner.
Whether this reconfiguration will last remains to be seen. Fourquet thinks things have not yet stabilised: “If this was a Netflix series, the 2017 election started season one and we are just at the beginning of season two”.
Bordeaux’s boom
Bordeaux went through a political shake-up of its own last year when a green candidate beat out the centre-right for the first time, showing how the city has moved to the left under the influence of newcomers attracted there by economic growth and quality of life. Mélenchon’s scores improved by 6 points in the first round versus 2017, mirroring his strong performances in cities.
Estelle Ricard, a 43-year-old who founded a travel agency that runs wine tours, is one of those who has benefited from Bordeaux’s boom. Her business has grown as more international tourists have flocked to the city, although the pandemic was a difficult stretch. “Things are getting better now and my quality of life here is great”, she said.
The city has been on a growth tear for more than two decades starting when then mayor Alain Juppé set about redeveloping the “sleeping beauty” port city. Big projects boosted the city’s attractiveness, such as the addition of a tramway, pedestrian zones in the historic centre and renovation of riverside quays to turn what was once a highway into a pleasant place to stroll or bike.
The economy expanded, driven by the civilian and military aviation industry that has long been present here, and the growth of the tourism sector that marketed the city as a cultural hub and gateway to wine country.
The number of jobs in Bordeaux increased 15 per cent between 2008 and 2018 — the third highest growth among French cities of more than 100,000 people.
The arrival of the TGV that connected Bordeaux to Paris in two hours in 2017 made the city even more attractive. The population continued to grow and housing prices rose even faster than in Paris.
Growth brought new problems, however. As housing became less affordable, people earning lower salaries and students were forced to move further out in newly expanded bedroom communities around the city. Traffic congestion worsened. Crime rates have also risen, something that local elected officials from Le Pen’s Rassemblement National never miss an opportunity to point out and pin on migrants.
The Bordeaux boom helped feed the anti-government gilets jaunes movement in late 2018, according to local officials. “The movement was very violent here, especially in the crescent of poverty”, says Jean-Luc Gleyze, a Socialist politician who heads the Gironde department.
“They would converge on Bordeaux every weekend to protest, sometimes violently, as if they wanted to express their rejection of the city and how it was siphoning off the wellbeing and life of the towns”.
Burning frustrations
The gilets jaunes movement began over a fuel tax but soon morphed into a much broader protest about how working class people were struggling under Macron. Among its participants was Dominique Colombo, a retired teacher in Sainte-Foy-La-Grande. “We needed to stand up and shout, this is not OK any more!” he says.
The movement gave people a way to express their angst about the rising cost of housing and transport, the belief that taxes were too high and the government too bloated, and a growing sense especially among the elderly that they had worked all their lives only to retire with a pension too small to live on, Colombo says.
In an attempt to quell the fire, Macron launched the Grand Débat National, two months of listening sessions organised all over the country to consult the French on taxes and public spending, public services and how to transition to a low-carbon economy.
The president billed it as a new type of participative democracy and attended dozens of the sessions, often staying for hours to debate with people. Afterwards, citizens submitted their views in more than 16,000 cahiers de doléances, or notebooks of grievances, from each town.
Colombo attended a debate but came away disappointed. “They listened but then nothing happened. There was no political response to the gilets jaunes movement”, he says.
Le Pen’s response to the protests has been to pour fuel on the fire — claiming that Macron’s government has ignored the countryside in favour of building up the métropoles, with high-speed rail links to Paris and tax breaks and subsidies to attract business.
The reality is more complex because France still redistributes a significant amount of wealth to poorer areas via income support, public works and social programmes, much more than in the US or the UK.
For example, Sainte-Foy-La-Grande benefits from a train station to link it to Bordeaux, a publicly funded fibre broadband network, and it was selected for support in a new €3bn programme to help small towns started by Macron’s government.
Elected officials in Gironde, many of whom are Socialists, also say they are trying to address the imbalances in the department so as to combat the rise of the extreme vote.
In Sainte-Foy-La-Grande, mayor Guionie will renovate the elementary new school and is trying to woo home buyers priced out of Bordeaux with tax breaks. Gleyze is also trying to get better suburban and local rail service funded.
None of that seems to register with many here and across Gironde, where Gleyze says the discontent of the gilets jaunes movement remains strong. “It can come out in the voting booth or in the street”.
In Gironde as elsewhere, the cahiers de doleances holding the desires, dreams and complaints of the French, often addressed to Macron himself, have been catalogued and stored in the departmental archives. One handwritten by a person living in an impoverished town near Sainte-Foy warned: “It is time Mr President for you to change your ways before it is too late”.
Leila Abboud and Eir Nolsoe.