To See How the Far Right Might Run France, See How They Run This City. The Nation. August 5, 2024.
Perpignan had been lingering in the recesses of my mind for three years when I arrived on a train from Montpellier last fall. It was the day after France had pushed its clocks back an hour, the day before Halloween. The late-afternoon skies were newly dark and the southern city’s tangled, dusty streets felt haunted.
As I crisscrossed the city countless times over the following week, I tried to separate the reality of Perpignan from the image of Perpignan that exists in the public imagination—and that had been forming in my own imagination since 2020, when many of the far-right activists I report on suddenly started name-dropping it in our conversations. As the first French city of over 100,000 people to elect a far-right mayor in a quarter-century, Perpignan has been held up by the far right—the National Rally, formerly National Front—as a symbol of its current success and future potential. I’d repeatedly heard from young National Rally members that Louis Aliot’s 2020 election served as proof that the party had reached the mainstream and that the French people were ready to elect a far-right leader, either longtime party head Marine Le Pen or her 28-year-old protégé, Jordan Bardella.
But during my time in Perpignan, I met with community organizers, candidates for office, union leaders, human rights activists, food justice workers, cycling advocates, teachers, and long-time residents who told a different story of Perpignan, one that highlighted the many factors—severe inequality, poverty, unemployment, and political disengagement, to name a few—that helped land Aliot in City Hall.
My latest feature, published today in The Nation, chronicles life and resistance under far-right rule—an investigation of the myriad ways in which the far right can assume power and transform a city with many residents barely blinking an eye.
To See How the Far Right Might Run France, See How They Run This City. The Nation. August 5, 2024.
As always, you can find the full archive of past newsletters here.