Monitoring the campaign poster saga a short distance from Villa Ndio has been an opportunity for me to appreciate the push and pull between right and left extremes in French politics from a fairly disinterested perspective. From time to time, I pass by one of the public signboards that are available for posting various announcements. This one is quite remarkable for its visibility from the main (and only) road between Peymeinade and Grasse. Above the signboard, it says “Grasse – Libre à vous afficher” (meaning it’s supposedly available for anyone to post something). But it is clearly dominated by rival political factions in the immediate vicinity of the signboard – a small enclave known as “Ste Anne”.
I have been fascinated by what clearly is a competition between supporters of the extreme right and the extreme left in French politics. And all of it is also very emphatically anti-Macron. So I’ve been using my smartphone to photograph the competing dynamics. Some time ago, I posted a commentary on the competition as it related to the 2022 Presidential and legislative elections in France. With this commentary, I include photos from 2024 – mostly relating to the European parliamentary elections that were held throughout Europe on 6 to 9 June, and specifically in France on 9 June. Sure enough, one can see the same sort of feuding between extreme right andextreme left as there was in 2022.
First, there was the rather ideologically left but not election-oriented poster from La France Insoumise.
This was soon followed by a barrage of posters supporting Marine Le Pen and her protegé Jordan Bardella for the European Parliament. Someone, however, soon decided to damage them. 
Shortly thereafter, the Melanchon supporters came back with their anti-Macron posters – none yet, though, for the Melanchon-supported candidates. 
And this was then followed by a series of farther-to-the-left posters (the Communists, calling themselves Patriotes, of course). 
This didn’t last long, though, when the Le Pen people put up their posters for a
rally in Marseille. 
T
hey were then displaced by a group farther to the right than Le Pen! 
And finally, the LFI – still extreme but not the Communists – came up with their list for the parliamentary elections and took over the signboard once again.
One should note that the European Parliamentary elections have national lists that are voted in each country, and voters choose their preferred list. The national vote is then tallied for each list, and seats are allocated accordingly at the national level.
As predicted, the Le Pen party (Rassemblement National or RN – in English National Rally) received the largest number of votes in France – over 30%. This was especially a setback for President Macron and his party, which garnered less than half that (14.6%) and lost ten of their seats in the European Parliament. The Melanchon party (La France Insoumise) ran separately from the other left-of-center parties that they had been aligned with in the National Assembly. But they did increase their share by three seats. Surprisingly, the Socialists also picked up seven seats this time around, while the Greens lost eight. The center-right Republicans also lost two. Alarmingly, though, the extreme right (see the Marion Maréchal poster above) picked up five seats as a newcomer to the European Parliament.
It did surprise the French political world when President Macron announced, immediately after these results were announced on 10 June, that the French National Assembly was being dissolved and new elections were to be held at this national level – before the Olympics! That made for an unusually short time frame and a gamble for Macron that the momentum for the extreme right could be confronted and managed more effectively in the immediate context rather than waiting for the 2027 Presidential election. These national elections were held on 23 June and 7 July.
I didn’t track the Ste Anne signboard for these elections. I was out of the country for the first round, in any case. But at the National Assembly level, the candidates are not elected nationally but in single-member districts. In Grasse North (which includes Ste Anne), the incumbent was already RN and was re-elected in the first round. Peymeinade, it seems, is in the same district. I did capture a photo of the candidate boards in front of the local polling place at the school across the street from Villa Ndio.
They looked rather pathetic but fair enough. His name appears in small print below Bardella on the RN poster above. Since he got over 50% of the vote in the first round, there was no second round in this district.
We are in the Alpes-Maritime Department, which has nine districts for the National Assembly. Six of them are held by Republicans (including the controversial Eric Ciotti who aligned himself with the RN), and three are held by RN members. So whatever feuding there may be in that Ste Anne enclave between extreme right and extreme left is only indicative of that community’s hostility to anything at the center. The groups may be feuding, but they might also be overlapping in their commonly shared inclinations to align with the extremes.
