MARSEILLE, France—Sitting in his spacious office overlooking the city’s Vieux Port, where ships have come and gone for more than 2,600 years, Marseille Mayor Benoît Payan acknowledges something that may have once seemed unthinkable: The far-right National Rally (RN) stands a real shot at capturing his seat in March.
This longtime hub for immigration is reputed for its autonomous spirit—as the adage goes, locals identify more as Marseillais than French. But as the incumbent left-wing mayor laments, Marseille is not immune from political winds blowing across the rest of France.
“There’s an anxiety-inducing climate, a permanent and violent confusion between immigration and insecurity,” he said. “The power of certain media and the tragedies the city has known because of drug trafficking have become fertile ground for the National Rally to play on people’s fears.”
Ahead of two-round municipal elections slated for March 15 and 22, Payan is right to be concerned. Assuming no candidate secures an outright majority in the first round, all lists that receive at least 10 percent of the vote qualify for the second round. And in the case of a four-way runoff, the scenario projected by the latest polling, Payan is running neck and neck with the RN’s Franck Allisio. Trailing the two front-runners are Martine Vassal, a local conservative political baron backed by President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, and Sébastien Delogu, a lawmaker-turned-social media sensation trying to outflank Payan from the left.
Local elections are known for tactical alliances and last-minute dealmaking between rounds. Still, the consensus among observers is that in a crowded second round in which none of the four candidates stand down, the RN has a narrow path to victory—a triumph that would rank as one of the greatest in the party’s 54-year history, just a year ahead of pivotal presidential elections.
On the one hand, the RN’s rise in Marseille mirrors national trends. Like elsewhere in France, the party is boosting its support among working-class voters just as it wins over droves of middle-class conservatives, assembling a broad coalition through a laser-like emphasis on the issue of security—an all-encompassing theme that weaves together backlash over crime, immigration, and stagnating living standards.
When asked by Foreign Policy to describe the most important topics in the race, Allisio, a current National Assembly member, kept to the script. “The first, second, and third concern,” he said over the phone, “is security.”
At the same time, the RN’s message of law and order carries particular appeal in a city facing a rise in recent years of drug-related violence, much of it concentrated in the under-resourced quartiers nord, or “northern neighborhoods.” Marseille still has a lower per capita crime rate than both Paris and Lyon, and in highly centralized France, policing is largely the national government’s responsibility. Yet in a city where foreign-born individuals make up 16 percent of the population—higher than the national average of around 11 percent—the RN’s dubious efforts to link immigration with crime at large have found a receptive audience.
At a campaign rally in January, Allisio supporters from across the socioeconomic spectrum voiced similar concerns.
“It’s above all about insecurity,” said Monique, a 73-year-old retired clerk from the state electricity company EDF, who declined to give her last name. Monique voted for Payan’s left-wing coalition in the last mayoral election in 2020 but is now rooting for Allisio. “By insecurity, I mean housing projects in the peripheries of Marseille that are no longer domains of the republic, where the police don’t even go,” she said.
Like many RN voters in Marseille, Monique and her husband Denis don’t actually reside in those areas themselves. But they live close enough to feel threatened—in the quiet residential neighborhood of Les Olives, a place that more closely resembles an old Provençal village than Marseille’s bustling city center. “We’ve seen people who live in the projects, and there are dealers everywhere. You see weapons,” she said. “They’re in prison in their housing projects.”
Denis, also a retiree from EDF, brushed aside the notion that the RN’s tradition of immigrant-bashing was incompatible with Marseille’s cosmopolitan identity. “France is a country of immigration, but the migrants [in the past] came from Italy or Spain and so on,” he said, before rehashing a common xenophobic trope: “They were fully signed up into French society, and they didn’t need to live on welfare like the people coming into France today.”
The RN is also earning support from wealthier conservatives—people such as Eric, a 62-year-old retired police officer. Eric, who declined to provide his surname, resides in the well-to-do 9th arrondissement. Although he voted for Vassal, the mainstream right-wing candidate, in 2020, he said he was now leaning toward Allisio. “The city is in a slump from an economic point of view and a security point of view,” he said as he waited in line outside the RN rally. He also blasted Vassal’s party, the Republicans, for seeking alliances with Macron’s party: “When you support a certain platform and you see later this platform is completely abandoned, you’re dealing with people who haven’t kept their promises.”
Further aiding Allisio is his textbook-like adherence to RN leader Marine Le Pen’s “de-demonization” strategy, a highly successful push to normalize the party’s image. Many French conservatives may still balk at backing a party founded by a convicted Holocaust denier, but Allisio’s resume reads like that of a more conventional right-wing politician: Before joining the RN in 2015, he worked as a parliamentary aide for the Republicans and an advisor to a minister under Nicolas Sarkozy’s presidency. Likewise, when Allisio broaches the subject of the economy, he sounds like a standard French conservative. “My platform is clearly pro-business, pro-work, pro-enterprise,” he told me.
Still, according to Payan and his supporters, the old demons of the far right aren’t lurking far from the surface. They pointed to a flyer circulated by Allisio supporters that featured photos of Payan’s hypothetical governing team along with titles such as “deputy mayor in charge of Algerian preference” and “deputy mayor in charge of relations with Islamists.” They’ve also drawn attention to the endorsements that Allisio has won from even more extreme parties—among them, Reconquête (“Reconquest”), the party of Éric Zemmour, a polemicist and 2022 presidential candidate who has been convicted multiple times of hate speech and espouses the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, the idea that Western politicians are deliberately flooding their nations with nonwhite migrants. The list of supporters also includes the Party of France, an even more fringe party that publicly defends the legacy of the collaborationist Vichy regime.
In early February, investigative outlet Les Jours reported a story that cast doubt on Allisio’s own squeaky-clean credentials: The mayoral hopeful allegedly expelled from his own small political organization an activist who had publicly criticized racist messages that were sent in an RN WhatsApp group in the southern town of Grasse.
“They can try to put on a virtuous mask, and they can talk about unity and change, but the polish always ends up cracking,” Payan said. “The words and writings of those close to Allisio show us that we’re dealing with not even the National Rally of Marine Le Pen, but rather the National Rally of [her father] Jean-Marie Le Pen from the 1970s.”
While Payan, a former Socialist Party member, is running against the ascendant far right, he also knows that the race is a referendum on his own term, which began with sky-high expectations in 2020. Bringing together Socialists, Greens, and Communists, his upstart coalition Printemps Marseillais, or “Marseille Spring,” ended 25 years of conservative rule, promising to usher in a new era to civic life. Under Payan, the city has built 27 new elementary schools and kindergartens in addition to offering free school supplies and expanding access to a free lunch program. It has expanded cultural programming and made public museums free of charge. And as Payan proudly noted in his interview, the city has doubled the size of its municipal police force, which now counts 800 officers.
Théo Challande Névoret, the outgoing deputy mayor in charge of anti-discrimination policies, is not running for reelection, citing a mix of personal and political reasons. But he said he viewed the coalition’s first term in office as an unambiguous success. “When you look at the before and after, it’s like night and day,” he told me. “There have been major structural changes.”
Payan’s leadership, however, has not pleased everyone on the left. Some progressive voters remain alienated by the circumstances under which he took office: While his Marseille Spring coalition originally campaigned behind Michèle Rubirola of the Greens in 2020, Rubirola resigned as mayor after just five months in office and handed her post to Payan, her second-in-command. “Le Switch,” as local press dubbed the maneuver, fueled suspicions of an orchestrated plan to win over voters who might have otherwise been reluctant to support a Socialist heading the alliance. Meanwhile, the slow pace of change on housing and transport policies in Marseille—both of which are largely set by the right-wing metropolitan government that includes smaller and wealthier towns—has opened up space for a challenger from Payan’s left.
Aiming to seize the opportunity is Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (“France Unbowed,” or LFI), which did not run a candidate in Marseille in 2020. As in Paris, LFI is not joining a united left-wing coalition in Marseille. And much like in the capital, the head of the ticket in Marseille’s election is a staunch Mélenchon loyalist: Delogu, a former taxi driver and current parliamentarian known for his support for Palestine and social media presence. “Payan does not represent the left,” Delogu told Foreign Policy. “I represent the left.”
Until voters head to the polls, Payan and Delogu are effectively engaged in a high-stakes game of chicken. The mayor hopes to prevent Delogu from even qualifying for the runoff round—and if he does qualify, Payan insists it’s incumbent on him to withdraw from the race to reduce the RN’s chances.
Delogu, for his part, told me that “there is no world in which we withdraw.” Instead, he claims that he will arrive ahead of Payan—an extremely unlikely scenario, according to polls—and at that point, LFI will entertain the possibility of joining forces with him.
Challande Névoret, for one, believes both camps will revisit their public-facing positions if it appears that the RN could actually win after the first round—a calculation that may also hinge on what the mainstream right decides to do. “When the question is … what to do to stop the far right from winning, there’s always a unity agreement of some kind or candidacies that are withdrawn,” he said.
Assuming that Delogu does qualify for the runoff, a high-intensity scramble on the left appears all but inevitable. And in the absence of a deal between the rival campaigns, voters could still take destiny into their own hands by rallying around Payan, the left’s clear front-runner.
Even if the RN falls short in its bid to win Marseille, it will almost certainly be able to claim a handsome consolation prize. The far-right party is poised to send dozens of councilors to city hall and, by extension, to the metropolitan government—critical assets in the ongoing battle to detoxify its image and overtake the mainstream right.
And as the 2027 election cycle approaches, RN leaders know that the national landscape is much friendlier than the one they’re navigating in France’s second city: A mass of center-left voters may well be able to deny Le Pen’s party in Marseille, but it’s going to be a much tougher act to pull off in a presidential election.
