The Bourgogne-Franche Comté regional express train from Paris takes just 74 minutes to reach Joigny on the banks of the River Yonne in northern Burgundy. Here, the fringes of the capital’s commuter belt meet the countryside among the narrow streets of half-timbered houses and medieval churches, surrounded by fields and the Côte Saint-Jacques vineyards.
For decades, the largely agricultural area has been fertile ground for many shades of the French left – the Resistance and later the Socialist president François Mitterrand were rooted in Burgundy. Today it is where French socialism just about stops the slide of grassroots support to the far right.
A decade ago, France’s centre-left Parti Socialist (PS) was the driving power in French politics: it had a president, François Hollande; a majority in both houses of parliament, the Assemblée Nationale and the Sénat; and control of most of the country’s major local authorities.
Now, less than two weeks from the first round of the presidential election, with its candidate Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, trailing in the latest polls at 1.5% (lower than a sheep farmer called Jean Lassalle and the Communist party candidate Fabien Roussel), the mainstream left is in an electoral black hole leaving its voters facing what they call a casse-tête – a major headache.
Do they vote for a leftwing candidate on principle even if opinion polls suggest none stands the slightest chance of getting through to the second round (except perhaps Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a charismatic figure of the hard-left currently polling in third place but considered too radical by many)? Do they vote for Emmanuel Macron to hold off the far right’s Marine Le Pen? Or do they stay at home and not vote at all?
Sitting in his mayoral office overlooking the River Yonne in Joigny, Nicolas Soret is resigned to his party’s presidential defeat. “Like you, I can only observe that winning this election does not seem possible,” he says diplomatically and, as a Hidalgo supporter, with regret. Locally, Soret, a popular mayor, can be congratulated for pulling off a political feat that has proven impossible at a national level: in the last municipal and departmental elections, he united a range of leftwing candidates – including Greens and Communists – to see off the far right.
“We realised that if we didn’t join forces we could only lose,” Soret says. “So we got together and agreed on a local programme, based on local issues and local knowledge and that’s why it worked. I really don’t think it would be possible at national level, but on the ground the left is still here, the voters are still here and the elected officials are still here. We have shown there are leftwing voters out there. Sometimes you have to dig a bit deeper to find them, but they are there.”
Joigny has become the symbol of La France péripherique, a term used to evoke the territorial fracture between city and countryside whose populations have been left behind: excluded from jobs, public services, access to high speed internet and – as they are more reliant on cars – among the worst hit by the soaring cost of living.
It was one of the first places Hidalgo visited on launching her campaign, declaring it typical of an ailing, rural and semi-rural France full of people worried for their futures in a way those from the cities did not understand.
“The factories and businesses have closed and not been replaced, the public services have left, the centre of the town is deserted, youngsters no longer find work opportunities and their parents are worried,” she said afterwards.
Joviniens, as the town’s 9,500 inhabitants call themselves, have good reason to feel sidelined, having borne the brunt of the major administrative reorganisations of the past two decades. For 260 years it was a garrison town, but in 2010, François Fillon’s rightwing government sent the local regiment to Alsace in eastern France and overnight it lost 410 military and army civilian personnel who injected an estimated 80% of their total €7.8m annual income into the local economy. Then the town also lost its magistrates and commercial courts, as well as the hospital’s maternity and surgical units. Its treasury and tax offices and police commissariat were all downsized. In 2008 the Stypen factory, a subsidiary of Bic, making fountain pens for the country’s schoolchildren, shut down, throwing 61 mostly middle-aged local women out of work. A 2011 Sénat report described Joigny as the “martyred town” of rightwing government policy.
“It was all done without any consultation with us,” Soret says of the administrative changes. “It was imposed on us. We were the town that was hit on the head over and over again.
“Ten years ago we were on our knees and we’re only now slowly getting back on our feet. But it has led to a certain fatalism among the population that has nourished the far-right vote.”
Marcel Reynaud, the owner of Couleurs Leroux, which has supplied high-quality pigments and oil paints to artists – including Salvador Dalí – for 112 years, says he hears a lot of local talk about supporting Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National (RN).
“In the routier [truckers’] cafes it’s all about how they will be voting RN because they feel their social protections, their pay, their hours, their conditions have got worse and worse. It’s very odd, because these are traditional leftwing voters. It seems they no longer believe in the sincerity of the PS or, more importantly, it’s ability to improve their lives.
“These people voting RN are not ‘fascists’; they are voting RN because they don’t feel the PS have protected them or improved their situation.”
Reynaud, 61, frets about homelessness, poverty, social justice, inequality and the undervaluing of essential workers such as nurses and teachers. He supports the idea of a universal minimum revenue – the Socialist candidate’s key pledge in 2017 – but says he is not sure who he will vote for this time around. He is not alone.
With the presidential campaign so far hijacked by the far right and its obsession with the three “i”s – Islam, Immigration and Integration – moderate leftwing voters feel politically orphaned and there could be worse to come. If Hidalgo fails to reach 5% in the first round, her campaign expenses will not be reimbursed by the state, leaving the PS in afinancial crisis just before the legislative elections in June.
Political analysts say the left in France, like elsewhere in Europe, has suffered from a tectonic shift to the right driven by populism. For the mainstream left – sometimes called the “government left” – the spiral began during Hollande’s 2012-17 single term in office, when he was accused of damaging the party’s credentials with a neoliberal agenda. After the 2017 presidential race, when the PS candidate failed to make the second round – a disaster also suffered by the centre-right Les Républicains – it was clear the mainstream left had lost the working-class vote to the far right, the radical vote to Mélenchon and the moderate left either to Macron’s new centrist party or the Greens.
Thomas Guénolé, a leftwing political scientist, argues Mélenchon made a “monumental error” after it was clear the PS vote had scattered. “He should have adapted his discourse, gathered everyone on the left around him and rebuilt leftwing unity behind him. Instead, he radicalised it and lost the moderate left.
“In 2017, everyone was asking Mélenchon to do this and he sent them packing in no uncertain terms.”
Manon Aubry, 32, the co-chair of The Left in the European parliament where she is an MEP, and campaigner for Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise, believes the PS is at the end of its political life and it is time for the French left to regroup around a new more radical vision. That Mélenchon is slowly rising in the latest polls suggests some voters agree.
“For people of my generation the PS has nothing to say or offer. We are in a turning point for the left in France. This doesn’t mean socialist ideas are dead but they have to be reborn in a new political force,” Aubry told the Guardian.
“Our message for this election is we have to eliminate the extreme right in the first round, then we can have a proper debate about two completely opposite visions for society, that of Emmanuel Macron and that of Jean-Luc Mélenchon.”
Back in Joigny, Reynaud, like many others, is still mulling over who to vote for in the first round. “Maybe Mélenchon,” he says. “Maybe the Greens.
“To me it’s not a question of right or left, it’s about addressing the issues that concern people, namely poverty and the future of the planet. How can we be living in a country with people who have such wealth, while there are those on the streets with no homes over their head, nothing to eat … that’s what I want someone to answer.”
