Jordan Bardella’s hometown won’t be voting for him

SAINT-DENIS, France — In Saint-Denis, one of the most populous suburbs in Paris, nearly one in three inhabitants is an immigrant.

The district also happens to be the hometown of far-right leader Jordan Bardella — and the incarnation of everything he despises about modern France.

A traditional French cheese merchant is neighbors with a halal butcher; a phone salesman sits beside a vendor selling traditional Muslim garments; and women wearing hijabs walk next to young Parisian professionals who moved to the suburbs in search of cheaper rent.

For Bardella, who stands a shot at becoming prime minister for the anti-immigrant National Rally after a two-round parliamentary election on June 30 and July 7, this isn’t a version of France he embraces.

Raised in Saint-Denis, Bardella has said his childhood experiences prompted him to go into politics. “I’ve experienced to the core the feeling of becoming a foreigner in one’s own country. I’ve experienced the Islamization of my neighborhood,” he said earlier this month.

On a scorching morning only days before France’s historic snap election, the main Saint-Denis market was abuzz with political activists touting their candidates. Every party joined the fray except one: the National Rally (RN).

“There’s a visceral rejection of the RN here,” said Louis-Auxile Maillard, who is running for the conservative Les Républicains party. “The local RN candidate can’t put his face on his posters for fear of retaliation. I myself have faced some aggression when people see blue on my leaflets and associate me with [the RN].”

‘Maybe the National Rally should win’

There’s even an empty spot where the RN’s official poster should be glued on billboards in front of polling stations.

In Saint-Denis, nearly one in three inhabitants is an immigrant. | Victor Goury-Laffont/POLITICO

While the party is polling well ahead of its competitors nationwide, Saint-Denis is a world apart.

Barring a major upset, the electoral district of Saint-Denis will remain firmly on the left of the political spectrum. Communist Party member Stéphane Peu is being backed by a broad left-wing alliance that includes his own party, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s radical-left France Unbowed movement, the Socialists and the Greens. Two years ago this coalition helped him win reelection comfortably with nearly 80 percent of the vote in a run-off against a candidate who supported centrist President Emmanuel Macron.

“In the teachers’ lounge, there’s a great deal of anxiety building up” at the prospect of a National Rally victory, said Kadia Kheriz, a high school teacher of Algerian descent in Saint-Denis whose family has lived in France for three generations.

The frustration with politicians goes beyond the far right and its policies toward Muslims, which include plans to ultimately outlaw wearing the hijab in public places.

Many Saint-Denis inhabitants said they had taken offense at some key legislation passed under Macron’s presidency, including a bill to combat “Islamist separatism” which critics said stigmatized minorities, and the decision to ban abayas, long dresses worn by some Muslim women, in schools.

“When you look at the laws which were passed, threatening us with an RN victory isn’t as effective because it already feels like the diversity which we cherish in our region is under attack,” Kheriz said. “At times, I have found myself thinking: ‘Maybe they should win so everything finally blows over.’ But as their victory gets closer, I’ve come back from that.”

The most outspoken critics of the measures enacted under Macron have come from Mélenchon’s France Unbowed (LFI) movement, which has repeatedly spoken out against what it perceived as Islamophobic policies. That stance may be paying off: Some 62 percent of Muslim voters opted for France Unbowed candidates in the European election in early June, according to an IFOP poll. In Saint-Denis LFI scored over 50 percent in the vote, compared with less than 10 percent nationwide.

“Defense of laïcité [the French model of secularism] has been ineffective because the people in charge don’t live in areas like Saint-Denis and don’t interact with Muslims on a daily basis,” conservative candidate Maillard said. “You also have people like France Unbowed who feed a victim mentality, which isn’t to say there isn’t Islamophobia, but you have politicians fanning the flames of division to win votes.”

“The best way for fascists to prevent class struggle is to divert it into racism, into the fight against Muslims … That’s why we can’t move forward without leading the fight against racism,” Mélenchon wrote in a 2022 post on X.

The frustration with politicians goes beyond the far right and its policies toward Muslims. | Victor Goury-Laffont/POLITICO

Grassroots challenger

Others on the left haven’t taken the same approach, and the difference can be seen in their positions on the “anti-separatism” bill.

The bill contains legal tools to extend the French principle of secularism, which prohibits civil servants from wearing ostentatious religious symbols like the Muslim headscarf, and introduced stricter control of foreign donations to religious organizations. Macron proposed the legislation in 2020 as France reeled from a string of attacks by Islamist groups.

While Mélenchon’s entire France Unbowed group voted against the “anti-separatism” bill, most Communist MPs, including Saint-Denis MP Peu, abstained.

Given the divisions within the left on this and other topics, Peu will face a challenge from his left in the June 30 election mounted by Anasse Kazib, a 37-year-old railway worker and spokesperson for the Trotskyist Permanent Revolution movement.

Kazib’s troops were out in force in Saint-Denis, distributing flyers claiming the fight against both Macron’s policies and the far right could not be conducted in alliance with the moderate Socialist Party and Greens. Instead, the movement pledged to combat “all racist and Islamophobic laws.”

Many Saint-Denis inhabitants said they had taken offense at some key legislation passed under Emmanuel Macron’s presidency. | Pool photo by Yves Herman via Getty Images

Talking to voters, Kazib underlined Peu’s abstention on the “anti-separatism” bill.

“Right-wing politicians are direct about their opposition to blacks and Arabs, left-wing politicians promise to defend us, then they come in and say ‘Oh but I’m not sure what to think about headscarves, about this or that,’” he argued.

Kazib was raised in Sarcelles, another poor Parisian suburb with a large immigrant community, after his parents moved to France from Morocco. The far-left activist has built his grassroots candidacy on his experience of the economic hardships and discrimination faced by the population of Saint-Denis.

His pitch is turning heads.

In a café on one of the city’s main streets, a man who said he had immigrated from an African country and wanted to remain anonymous, praised Kazib’s “bravery” and his will to “defend the interest of [people in] Saint-Denis.”

Invoking France’s colonial empire, which included large parts of Africa, the man attacked the anti-immigration talking points in the election.

“All immigrants and descendants of immigrants should be proud to say that whatever they receive from France is just a small repayment of all that was taken from us,” he said.