French politics burns in the summer heat

The waiter at the Creperie du Port, which stands where the Corsica ferry disgorges its passengers, tells me it’s “problematique” to let people know how you vote. Two young women students at the next table say they really want change, and most students will vote for the left. But they do not say how they will vote, and when they learn I am a journalist, they ask me not to print their names.

Over morning coffee at my local boulangerie, a middle aged woman tells me the election is “une bagarre, une guerre” (a fight, a war.) “Ils sont tous merde.” (They are all shit.) The man at the next table chimes in despairingly: “L’extreme droit, l’extreme gauche….”

What about the centre, personified by President Macron? “Oh, Macron.” They both make a Gallic gesture of dismissal, lifting their shoulders and holding out their hands. She will not vote. He will vote, he says, then remembers an urgent phone call he must make.

Four years ago, three people were killed in a knife attack inside a Nice church. Four years before that, on Bastille Day 2016, a truck was driven at the throngs of revellers along the Promenade des Anglais, killing 86 and injuring 434 more.

These attacks had the predictable effect of increasing support for the RN, and Eric Ciotti, who represents central Nice in the Assemblée Nationale, has come through the first round and will almost certainly be re-elected. He leads the minority faction of the gaullist party, Les Republicains, which supports an alliance with the RN.

Including Ciotti, four of the five constituencies which include parts of Nice are already held by the RN, and the fifth may well be taken by either the left or the RN.

Jewish Nazi-hunter and historian Serge Klarsfeld has said that if it’s a choice between the RN or the left, he would vote for the RN. This is mainly because the leader of a major group in the left coalition, Jean-Luc Melanchon, has shown a positively Corbynesque tendency to say crass and insensitive things about Jews.

Last month, in a Paris suburb, a 12-year-old Jewish girl was raped in what seems to have been an anti-Semitic attack by boys barely older than herself. Both left and right are busy blaming one another for creating the atmosphere in which something so horrific could happen.

So I knocked at the door of Nice’s synagogue. “There is no election going on here” said the kindly man who opened it, gesturing around the hushed room where a couple of people were praying. But I noticed two things.

First, there is no sign outside to say this is the synagogue, and worshippers must wait for the locked door to be opened.

Second, there is just one political interview on the synagogue website, and it is with Julien Odoul, the spokesman for the RN, who says his party will protect Jews against the anti-Semites of the left.

There is no mention of Raphael Glucksmann, the popular and effective Jewish socialist campaigner behind the revival of the left. Glucksmann put together an alliance of the squabbling French left for this election, admitting that it wasn’t a marriage of love but “we can’t leave France to the Le Pen family.”

But it looks as though at least some of Nice’s Jews are willing to accept the protection of the RN, which was founded by a man with a string of hate speech convictions, including one for calling the Holocaust “a detail” of history.

As one of Nice’s polling stations opened for the first round of voting on Sunday, Mr Ciotti’s representative attacked the official in charge with his fists before being dragged away by police. It’s not clear why, but beneath the placid surface, Nice is simmering in the summer heat.