Marseille’s Tight Mayoral Race Is a Bellwether for France’s Future

Franck Allisio and Benoît Payan do not agree on much. But they do share an instinct that the neck-and-neck election campaign they are running to be the mayor of Marseille could reverberate far beyond this ancient, polyglot Mediterranean port.

Since France’s democracy was restored after World War II, the far right has never governed Marseille, the country’s second city, let alone the republic. On Sunday, Mr. Allisio, the candidate of the far-right National Rally party, is projected to win enough votes to advance to a runoff on March 22 against Mr. Payan, the left-wing leader who has been mayor since 2020.

That would be a bellwether — both for municipal elections across France, in which the far right is expected to make landmark gains, and for next year’s race to elect a new president, which polls suggest that a far-right candidate could win for the first time.

“It will be a signal for the presidential election, and it will perhaps give courage and the desire to the French people to do the same thing as the Marseillais,” Mr. Allisio said in his campaign office, an empty apartment. He sat in front of a life-size poster of Marine Le Pen, a far-right fixture whose legal woes have so far stymied her presidential candidacy, and Jordan Bardella, her protégé, who is likely to run in her place.

Mr. Payan, working out of a crowded, chaotic campaign headquarters near the city’s old port, said he felt profound pressure not to lose the race. “We are in an election where Marseille has a rendezvous with its history,” he said.

In a city founded more than 2,600 years ago, history inevitably casts a long shadow. Philippe Pujol, a journalist and writer, describes Marseille as a “palimpsest,” where waves of arrivals have all left their mark. But it is the city’s modern-day history — widely portrayed in the French news media as a magnet for drug trafficking and violence — that has dominated this campaign. Mr. Allisio is one of four candidates who have made security their overriding theme.

With residents recoiling from a string of highly publicized drug-related killings, Marseille is fertile ground for a law-and-order message. Its political landscape is shifting in ways that mirror France as a whole, opening the doors of this diverse city to the far right.

Voting rates in Marseille’s central working-class districts, which traditionally support the left, have plummeted, particularly among young people. In more suburban districts, where voters are older and many own their homes, sentiment has swung from the center right, which governed Marseille from 1995 to 2020, to the far right.

Conservative homeowners increasingly view the far right as their protection against urban decay, said Michel Peraldi, an anthropologist and expert on Marseille at the French National Center for Scientific Research. “What scares me, and this really scares me,” he said, “is the dissolution of the right into the extreme right.”

Looming above all of this is France’s former empire, which once spanned much of North and West Africa. After World War II, Africans from France’s former colonies migrated in large numbers to French cities like Marseille. That migration fueled demographic change and sometimes a racist backlash. It also led to present-day tensions over perceived threats to French identity, traditions and security — anxieties that have propelled Mr. Allisio’s campaign.

A native of Marseille who, like many residents, claims Italian lineage, Mr. Allisio, 45, promises to triple the number of municipal police officers and double the video surveillance cameras. He wants to put parts of Marseille’s beaches off limits to those he refers to, without apology, as “scum” — young men whom he says steal, harass women and smoke joints next to families. Critics, noting that many of those young men are of Arab descent, accuse Mr. Allisio of racial stereotypes, which they say do little to address the city’s challenges.

Mr. Payan, 48, counters that reducing crime requires more than policing beaches. It involves rebuilding crumbling hospitals and schools (his administration has built 27 schools), easing unemployment, and giving people hope in a city where a quarter of residents live under the poverty line.

Mr. Payan said his opponent also needed to be honest about the mayoralty’s limited ability to root out drug trafficking. Criminal law enforcement is in the hands of the national police. Local police, most of whom do not carry guns, regulate traffic laws and hand out tickets. “We have about the same possibility of fighting drug trafficking as sending a rocket to the moon,” Mr. Payan said.

His frustration is that the debate over security is not tethered to the facts. In fact, drug-related killings declined from 49 in 2023 to 17 last year, according to Marseille’s prosecutor. Philippe Albrand, a former deputy police chief who oversaw antidrug enforcement, said that was because one gang, DZ Mafia, had grown so dominant that its members felt less need to attack rivals.

Such nuances are lost in the campaign rhetoric. “Today in France, which is crazy, someone can go on television and say the Earth is flat,” Mr. Payan said. “Why is the National Rally thriving? Because it plays on fears.”

In potentially better news for Mr. Payan, the national police struck a major blow against DZ Mafia last week, announcing that they had arrested 42 people, including several believed to be the gang’s leaders.

In the latest polls, he and Mr. Allisio have about 30 percent each. Under France’s two-step election process, either could win the first round and lose in a runoff, depending on how the backers of the third- and fourth-place finishers then vote.

Mr. Allisio’s opponents paint him as an outsider running a rootless campaign — hence the empty office, they say. Mr. Payan’s opponents call him a failed incumbent. On Marseille’s streets, where candidates’ posters are often torn down, it is easy to find people who express either view, and sometimes both.

Rabah Bouhadida, 56, a welder, said Mr. Payan had done nothing to improve life in Belle de Mai, a gritty district known for its North African shops and graffiti-covered houses. It is one of the poorest neighborhoods in Europe, but it also has a popular arts center, La Friche.

“He plays the nice guy,” Mr. Bouhadida said of Mr. Payan. Yet he added that he did not think electing Mr. Allisio would make a difference — and as a result, he did not plan to vote.

Whatever the statistics say, a handful of particularly harrowing crimes still loom large. In 2023, a 24-year-old woman was killed by a stray bullet fired into her apartment building.

Last November, Mehdi Kessaci, 20, was killed in what the authorities said was retribution for his activist brother’s outspoken criticism of the gangs. The reverberations reached Paris, bringing visits by V.I.P.s including President Emmanuel Macron, who had earlier launched an ambitious public investment program for Marseille.

But in this city, where people complain that the capital treats them like colonial subjects, few credit Mr. Macron with offering a lasting remedy. Amine Kessaci, Mehdi’s activist brother, who is campaigning on behalf of Mr. Payan, said politicians had been preoccupied by other issues, from terrorism to the economy.

“We are in a city where precariousness has been exacerbated for years,” said Mr. Kessaci, who is forced to travel with police protection. “For years, we left working-class neighborhoods behind.”

Some shiver at Mr. Allisio’s solution to that problem — give him the keys to city hall, and then put his party in possession of the French presidency next year, allowing them to work in tandem to secure the country.

“If Jordan Bardella or Marine Le Pen is president of the Republic in a year,” he said, “there will be an alignment of the planets between the desire of the mayor of Marseille for security and the desire of the president for security.”

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