Amine, dressed in a tracksuit and with his budding moustache not hiding his boyish face, says that Sunday’s elections have become the “only topic of conversation” among his friends in the town of Bobigny, located in the Seine-Saint-Denis department, near Paris. He admits that “talking about politics is not a normal thing,” both at home with his parents, who “are not interested,” and with his classmates at the Louise Michel high school. But the possibility of a far-right government in a few days, something he experiences with real dread, as if it were a nightmare, has transformed his attitude and that of those around him. “I am afraid of what they might do to us and of the racism that will be aroused,” he confesses. That is why the first thing this boy of Algerian origin and Muslim religion did when he turned 18 two months ago was to ask for his voter registration card. “We are all going to vote, especially the young people.”
Made up largely of immigrants and French people of foreign origin, the poorest department in the country, which only tends to make the media when riots occur, was the one with the lowest turnout in the first round of the last presidential elections in 2022, with an abstention rate of around 30% compared to the national average of 26.31%. At the time, Bobigny was singled out in particular for being one of the three towns in the department with the lowest turnout. However, two years later, there, turnout rose last Sunday in the first round of the legislative elections to 57.11% (the national average is 66.7% and in Seine-Saint-Denis as a whole, 47%). Like many other towns in the suburb, the periphery, Bobigny seems to have woken up electorally. “Abstention is often structural in the suburbbut in the last elections it was contained by the imminent danger [de un Gobierno del Reagrupamiento Nacional, el partido de Marine Le Pen]” explains Michel Kokoreff, professor of Sociology at the University of Paris-VIII, who links the increase in participation to the good results obtained by Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise.
During the election campaign, the RN has said that if it comes to power it will take measures such as abolishing the right of soil – the automatic attribution of nationality at the age of 18 to those born in France to foreign parents –, implementing national preference in the attribution of family allowances, restricting family reunifications or not assigning “sensitive” jobs to people with dual nationality. A series of decisions that cause concern among citizens such as Ameziane, a driving school teacher born in Bobigny 55 years ago and whose parents emigrated to France in 1954 from the Kabylie region in Algeria. “This morning, out of the six students who had driving lessons, three spoke to me about the RN and the legislative elections, something that never happens to me at work. They are very afraid,” he said last Thursday. Zorine, a 23-year-old communications student, whose mother is Syrian and whose father is Algerian, agrees with him. “In a neighbourhood like ours, where there is a lot of poverty, drug trafficking and young people who feel they have no future, what will the RN do with us, apart from bringing their hatred upon us?” he muses gravely.
Although the centre of Paris is only 40 minutes away from Bobigny, the difference between the two cities is abysmal. The first sight you see when you leave the Bobigny-Pablo Picasso metro station is that of camels operating in broad daylight, in the midst of inhabitants who no longer see them or have simply learned to ignore them. A little further on, the construction work to extend metro line 15, mixed with very high-rise buildings, most of them old and grey, leaves a feeling of neglect and coldness. This landscape, sandwiched between the Paris ring road and the A86 motorway, without even an urban centre and with brutalist architecture, gives off a hostility that contrasts with the friendly inhabitants who are proud to live in a multicultural municipality where they highlight the solidarity of its people. “Nobody thinks about those of us who live in the city, but they are not aware of the fact that we live in the city, and we … suburb“We are considered to be shit, otherwise, why don’t we have decent public schools? How do they expect us to develop ourselves intellectually, culturally in such an environment?” laments Zorine, who says that because she is white and “doesn’t look like an Arab” she manages to overcome the obstacles of a system she considers racist when looking for a job, something vital in her case so as “not to be a burden on the family.”
If anyone knows the feeling of the suburb This is the president of the 18th Chamber of the Bobigny Court, Youssef Badr. Raised by Moroccan immigrant parents who did not even speak French, along with his four siblings in Cergy, a poor suburb of Paris, absolutely nothing predestined this elegant man with a frank look and smile to become a prominent judge and an example for many young people. “Ask any young person from Bobigny or Saint-Denis if he sees himself becoming a judge one day and you will see that for them it is simply inconceivable,” laments the judge, who was spokesman for the Minister of Justice, Nicole Belloubet, between 2017 and 2019. If one word could sum up his journey it would be “effort”, both to catch up on the educational backwardness he was dragging along and to integrate the codes and cultural references of the capital’s bourgeoisie. His arrival at the Sorbonne was quite an event. Dressed in a tracksuit and wearing Airmax sneakers, he felt as if he had literally “traveled to the Moon” when he set foot in the prestigious university.
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“I find it incredible that young people from working-class neighbourhoods have mobilised when they have been abandoned for years,” says Badr, sitting in his small, cosy office at the Bobigny Court, where a copy of the magazine’s cover is on display. Sport Style starring Mbappé, a poster of the series The Wireand three green plants that he says he has a lot of affection for. “The fear felt by the young people in the neighbourhoods is palpable. They fear that they will study and then find themselves blocked, that the doors will be closed to them, particularly with regard to the issue of dual nationality. They are afraid that the RN will apply the measures it has announced,” explains this unconditional rap lover who decided to found an association, the Courte Échelle, with the aim of helping the young people of the suburb to find scholarships in courts or law firms and thus have the opportunity to develop a career in the field of law or in the high civil service due to “the clamorous lack of infrastructure and investment from the State.” The judge is currently alone in charge of the association and is no longer able to cope, but he hopes to be able to raise funds in the future to expand his work.
Wesley and Pérec are two of the 7,000 young people whom the magistrate has accompanied in recent years. The former, a 25-year-old law student, is terrified by the possible rise of the RN to power, as he cannot go to a demonstration without being asked for his identification by the police because he is mixed-race. “Somehow the situation forces us to act,” he believes. Pérec, a 21-year-old student of Ivorian origin, shares his vision. “We are all scared. I have a friend who wanted to work in the civil service and who gave it all up after the Ordre Nouveau neo-Nazi parade in Paris in May,” says the young man, who fears that one day he will have to work “for a fascist and racist state” or that his origins will be a hindrance when he takes the exams. Both will go to vote this Sunday to ensure that their worst nightmare does not become a reality.
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