PARIS/MALESHERBES: A 90-minute train ride from the Gare de Lyon station in Paris traces a political gulf between big-city voters and the rest, a divide that has shaken up Britain and the United States and has an outside chance of doing the same in France’s upcoming vote.
The further you go, the greater the support for the anti-immigrant, anti-Europe National Front (FN), judging by interviews with people living on the RER D commuter line and results from the most recent election, a regional poll in 2015.
At the Gare de Lyon, 32-year-old stage production manager Victor Leclere likes his multicultural neighbourhood in the heart of the capital.
With the presidential election just weeks away, he fears the popularity of the FN.
“We’re used to living all together,” he said as he boarded a train, a former Socialist voter now undecided. ‘‘I think it’s worrying, the image portrayed by the National Front, as if France wasn’t the multicultural country it already is.”
Villeneuve-Saint-Georges is just 19 minutes from Paris but with concrete blocks and highways a world away from the stone buildings and avenues of the centre of the capital.
Lucien Ngando, 30, an IT support technician of Congolese descent, said he could well back Le Pen this time.
He was angry with what he described as media bias favouring centrist Emmanuel Macron, whom pollsters see winning a presidential run-off vote in May against FN leader Marine Le Pen.
“She’s been demonised, ostracised, but I don’t think the FN is a bad party, we should give them a chance to change things in France,” he said on the RER D platform.
Ngando voted for Socialist Francois Hollande in 2012.
He said Le Pen and left-wing firebrand Jean-Luc Melenchon spent more time campaigning outside the capital than the other frontrunners, Macron and conservative Francois Fillon, and understood suburban dwellers better.
WINNERS AND LOSERS
Opinion polls predict Le Pen may possibly win the first round of the presidential election on April 23 but will lose the second round on May 7 against either of her main rivals.
The chances of a shock like the Brexit vote in Britain or Donald Trump’s victory in the United States depend on people living beyond the main cities, all of which showed relatively low FN votes in 2015 with numbers climbing further out.
In Paris, the FN won nearly 10 per cent of the vote in the regional election’s first round, while in Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, a suburb of 32,000 it was almost 29 per cent.
— Reuters
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