Five years after the Macronist tidal wave, Paris seems ready to veer to the left in the legislative elections: after the first round, the dynamic is on the side of the Nupes candidates, who came out on top in 12 of the 18 constituencies, half of them facing to those leaving the majority. “A mind-blowing voice progression. Elected in the first round with 56% of the vote in the 19th arrondissement, Sarah Legrain is enjoying an already victorious campaign, which had narrowly failed in 2017 against LREM candidate Mounir Mahjoubi.
At the time, the candidate of the Insoumis had gathered 7,000 votes in the first round, 14,000 in the second. With the investiture of the left coalition this time, Sarah Legrain totals nearly 21,000 entry ballots, three times more than her competitor Ensemble! Yanis Bacha. “My conviction is that we have progressed everywhere and that we are making this connection” between the popular electorate and the middle classes, the latter having “completely perceived what the Nupes program carried as a promise of progress,” says Sarah Legrain.
Regarding the more disadvantaged backgrounds, “we brought back to the polls a whole part of the population who never went there”, explains the new deputy, who will be accompanied to the Assembly by at least two other female figures from LFI, also elected in the North-East of Paris: Danièle Obono and Sophia Chikirou. Close to joining them in the 10th arrondissement, Danielle Simonnet (LFI) explains the “excellent” results of the Nupes in Paris by “the union effect and a rejection of Macron’s neoliberalism”.
Beyond the popular districts of the North-East, where the triumph of the elected LFI confirms the predominance of the Mélenchon vote in the first round of the presidential election (between 40 and 50% of the votes), the Nupes effect is spectacular everywhere in the capital city. Thus on the left bank, in a 12th constituency straddling two right-wing arrondissements, the 7th and the 15th, Céline Malaisé qualified for the second round (22%). Certainly far from the outgoing MP Olivia Grégoire, who became government spokesperson (39.5%), but ahead of the candidate LR, eliminated (17.5%). The elected communist, who gathered almost 8 points more than the total of the four left-wing candidates LFI, PS, EELV and PCF in 2017, believes that her voters are “the middle classes and part of the upper classes who consider that we need an alternative to Macron”.
Another net result: six of the nine Parisian deputies of the outgoing majority arrive behind Nupes in the first round, in particular Minister Stanislas Guerini and Laetitia Avia, behind by 14 points against Éva Sas in the 8th constituency (12th and 20th). “There is a dynamic that nobody can dispute, with a certain heterogeneity” on the left, says Laetitia Avia criticizing the “fifty shades of Nupes” proposed by the coalition.
For the Ensemble candidate, the second round will be a “time of clarification” for this “center-left” constituency, in which “many have not necessarily seen and identified Nupes as a far-left coalition”.
Same strategy on the side of another outgoing deputy in bad shape, Anne-Christine Lang (10th), ex-socialist, who presents herself as the incarnation of a “social-democratic, liberal, secular” left in the face of a ” Radical, Trotskyist Left Alliance”. His opponent Rodrigo Arenas, in very favorable waivers with 13 more points, believes that he has “vote reserves” for the second round. La Nupes “gives people hope,” he says.
In Montmartre, Pierre-Yves Bournazel (Horizons), almost 10 points behind ex-journalist Aymeric Caron (Nupes), plays the card of “hardworking deputy” and a “moderate personality” in order to change their mind “a very small part of this left-wing electorate which is not at all on the line of Mélenchon and who voted for Nupes to send a very clear message and restore color to the left. In Montparnasse, Maud Gatel (Modem), who arrived neck and neck with the socialist Olivia Polski, logically turns to the LR reserve (12% of the vote), an accessible electorate according to her.
