The first death threat came to the high school. Francis Daspe had been teaching history and geography at Lycée Maillol, in the southern French city of Perpignan, for about a decade when a letter arrived in May 2023. The next one came five months later—this time, to Daspe’s home. The third arrived a month after that, at the newly opened local office of France Unbowed, the left-wing political party with which Daspe has been involved for years. Each letter varied in its precise language and imagery, but they all contained violent threats. The anonymous sender accused Daspe of being an “extreme-left fascist” and an “accomplice of Islam and Islamism.” You’re “France’s executioners,” read one letter, under an illustration of a guillotine. “This is what awaits you.”

Daspe then publicized the letters. They elicited shock in the city of 120,000, located about eight miles west of the Mediterranean and 19 miles north of Spain. But perhaps Perpignan should have been less surprised. After all, it’s become one of the most crucial havens for far-right politics in France.

In 2020, the city elected Louis Aliot, a member of the far-right National Rally (formerly National Front) party, as mayor. It was the first time in 25 years that a French municipality of over 100,000 people had chosen a far-right mayoral candidate. The ascendancy and mainstreaming of the far right has haunted Western Europe for the past decade, with National Rally leader Marine Le Pen moving increasingly close to the presidency in the last two elections and the party making huge strides in European Parliament and legislative elections this summer. The party even briefly looked poised to lead the National Assembly, France’s largest legislative body. That dream was thwarted by a left-wing alliance, but there is no guarantee that the National Rally’s next attempt won’t be successful.

That’s why what happens in places like Perpignan matters. There, the far right is not a ghostly future threat but a daily reality. And since Aliot’s election, left-wing organizers have reported a rise in violence and intimidation—not, as far as they know, directly from the National Rally, long on a mission to present itself as respectable, but from extremists who seem newly empowered by the city’s endorsement of the once-fringe far right.

“We’re increasingly attacked, threatened,” said Mickael Idrac, another local France Unbowed leader who received a postcard with a guillotine. He coordinates the national party’s migration working group and ran for a seat in the European Parliament this summer. His brother, Florent, also a local party organizer, told me that people have approached him to threaten violence since Aliot came to power—once in a bar, another time at the city’s rugby stadium. He said autonomous far-right groups circulated photos of left-wing organizers so opponents could recognize them in public. Hugo Mazouz, a coleader of the party’s local youth wing, was in a bakery in January when a man shouted his name. “Little anti-fascist bitch,” he yelled. “We’ll fuck your dead.” Mazouz tried to de-escalate the situation, replying, “Smile, there are cameras.” It worked—the man left.

Aliot condemned the incident after Mazouz went public. But local organizers tie these increased threats to his presence in City Hall. A skilled career politician, Aliot has proceeded subtly, gradually enacting small but impactful reforms as he eyes reelection in 2026. Tourists easily come and go without realizing Perpignan is a test lab for life under the far right, yet a closer look reveals how Aliot has begun to chip away at civil society, instill a culture of fear, and normalize the National Rally, all while Le Pen eyes the French presidency in 2027 and the party faces new questions about the potential reaches—and limits—of its astounding rise.

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September 2024 Issue

I’ve been interviewing young National Rally members for seven years. Since 2020, they’ve repeatedly mentioned Perpignan as a symbol of the party’s success. This tiny city squished into a corner of southern France at the base of the Pyrenees—near the sea but not on the water, touristy but not on par with France’s many high-profile destinations—has transformed into a marker of the National Rally’s saliency and potential. The only hiccup is that Perpignan refuses to submit to such a clean-cut narrative.

Perpignan, as one resident told me, is “a paradox.” It was the capital of the Kingdom of Majorca in the 13th and 14th centuries, and residents wear their Catalan identity with pride. The 26-square-mile city has a population of middle-class families and retirees, but 32 percent of inhabitants live in poverty, making Perpignan one of France’s poorest municipalities. It’s situated in the Pyrénées-Orientales department—the country’s second poorest after Seine-Saint-Denis, a suburban region northeast of Paris. At over 12 percent, Pyrénées-Orientales also has the highest unemployment rate of France’s 96 departments, well above the national rate of 7.5 percent.

Most people believe Aliot was elected thanks to a combination of name recognition and a desire for anything other than the center-right politicians who held an iron grip on the city for over 60 years. Between 1959 and 2020, Perpignan had just three mayors—one of whom, Paul Alduy, governed for 34 years before handing power over to his son Jean-Paul, who ruled for another 16. That dynasty ended in 2009 with the election of Jean-Marc Pujol. But as the city got poorer and the perception of rising crime spread, residents grew desperate for change. Aliot beat Pujol by about six points in June 2020, during the early months of the Covid pandemic. Only 47 percent of residents voted, down from about 63 percent in the previous municipal election.

Aliot’s feints towards moderation contrast sharply with many of his actions. During his 2020 campaign, as Black Lives Matter protests were spreading across the Atlantic from the United States to France, Aliot declared that “anti-white racism is real.” After winning, he increased his salary by 17 percent. The next year, he changed the city’s official logo, replacing the motto “Perpignan the Catalan” with “Perpignan the radiant”—displacing the city’s Catalan history. And last winter, he set up a Nativity scene at City Hall, playing to his middle-class Christian base but angering opponents who said it violated the core French principle of secularism.

Aliot ran on a promise to prioritize security. In his first three years in office, he added about 30 police officers to the city’s force, bringing the total to nearly 200. Perpignan now has one of the highest officer-per-resident ratios in France. In 2022, Aliot proposed increasing police funding to 11 million euros, compared to 8 million three years earlier. That same year, he renamed a plaza after Pierre Sergent, a leader of the far-right paramilitary group Secret Army Organization, which carried out terrorist attacks in Algeria in the 1960s. Perpignan has a large community of descendants of pieds-noirs—French citizens living in Algeria under French rule—and Harkis, or Algerian Muslims who fought for France during the war of independence, and many protested the move. The city quietly removed the plaques bearing Sergent’s name in early 2023, after local activists covered one with a sign honoring Maurice Audin, a French mathematician and Algerian independence activist killed during the Battle of Algiers in 1957.

Aliot has also pushed through funding cuts to local associations, which have hit civil society particularly hard. The department’s chapter of the Movement Against Racism and for Friendship Between Nations lost 8,000 euros in municipal funding in 2022. The annual International Record and Comics Festival witnessed an 11 percent decline in funding—one of many cultural associations impacted by Aliot’s cuts. And at the end of 2023, the city announced a funding cut for the Communal Center for Social Action, which oversees and aids beneficiaries of public assistance programs.

Aliot’s actions represent “a rupture in the democratic pact,” said Françoise Attiba, copresident of the Pyrénées-Orientales branch of the human rights group League for the Rights of Man. There are more protests than before Aliot came to power, Attiba told me. “We’re more vigilant.”

Yet Perpignan remains the jewel in the National Rally’s nearly finished crown. It’s proof in the eyes of supporters that Le Pen’s “de-demonization” strategy to normalize the party and excise its demons—the racist, antisemitic, authoritarian, and patriarchal roots that have tainted the Le Pen name for over half a century—was more than just a superficial rebrand. In 2011, Le Pen took over the party leadership from her nonagenarian father, party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, a Holocaust denier six times convicted of inciting racial hatred. Aliot gave an interview in 2013 in which he explained that “de-demonization only concerns antisemitism.” Other parties, he said, were “worse” than the National Rally when it came to immigration or Islamophobia. “It’s antisemitism that prevents people from voting for us,” he said. “Once you jump over that ideological barrier, you free the rest.” Changing the party’s name from National Front to National Rally in 2018 was part of Le Pen’s effort to distance the party from its history.

Aliot was Le Pen’s romantic partner for about 10 years, but the 54-year-old’s involvement with the party goes back much further. He joined the National Front’s youth wing in 1990 and helped run Jean-Marie’s 2002 presidential campaign. A National Rally vice president for over a decade, Aliot ran for the party’s presidency in 2022 but lost by 70 points to then-27-year-old Le Pen protégé Jordan Bardella, a telegenic member of the European Parliament. Le Pen is still the party’s presidential candidate and de facto leader, but she stepped down from the official role of party president two years ago.

In the 2017 presidential election, Le Pen qualified for the runoff against President Emmanuel Macron but earned only about 33 percent of votes. In 2022, she garnered over 41 percent. Le Pen had become a legitimate threat in just five years, and her party pointed to Perpignan as a sign that it had shaken off the heavy shackles of Jean-Marie’s vilified views and was ready to be taken seriously.

The biggest test of that “de-demonization” effort came this summer. The National Rally won 30 seats—seven more than it previously held—in European Parliament elections in June, far outperforming every other party in France. The shocking results jolted Macron into spontaneously dissolving the National Assembly and holding snap elections to “clarify” the country’s political makeup. Led by Bardella, the National Rally came out on top in the election’s first round, followed by a nascent left-wing coalition called the New Popular Front.

But because France has so many political parties, French elections are held in two rounds, with runoffs if no candidate secures over 50 percent in the initial vote. And in the week between the two rounds, both the New Popular Front, which included France Unbowed, and Macron’s center-right Ensemble party campaigned heavily on the specter of a far-right win that could’ve made Bardella the country’s prime minister. Despite their fervent opposition to one another, they formed a “republican front,” encouraging their candidates to drop out of three-way races where the National Rally was leading if it would help a different non–National Rally candidate win. That front held: The New Popular Front placed first with 182 seats, Ensemble earned 168, and the National Rally, 148.

In a matter of weeks, expectations about the National Rally’s potential to govern had skyrocketed and then come crashing back down to Earth, aided by unusually high voter turnout. But the party’s 148 seats still marked a massive step up from its previous 89. It failed to meet the moment, raising questions about whether the National Rally has defanged itself as thoroughly as it would like everyone to believe, whether it had bashed head-first into a ceiling restraining its ascent—a ceiling it had perhaps imagined already shattered—and if it can ever fully shake the label of “far right” while pursuing policies that fit squarely into the far right’s core markers of authoritarianism, nativism, and populism.

But perhaps the moment had just arrived too soon. In many ways, the summer electoral spree left the party right where it began, albeit with fresh wounds to nurse: experiencing steady growth that was once unthinkable, but not quite ready to win on the national stage, especially when up against a newly united left instead of just the lonely, uninspiring figure of Macron.

Daspe, France Unbowed’s Pyrénées-Orientales coordinator, was the New Popular Front’s candidate in Perpignan’s district, garnering about 42 percent of votes in a runoff with the National Rally candidate. It was a strong showing, considering the context. Throughout Pyrénées-Orientales and along most of the country’s Mediterranean coast, with exceptions around liberal Marseille and Montpellier, the electoral map showed victory after victory for the National Rally—this recent string of votes only further reinforcing the party’s regional dominance, with a key center of power resting firmly in Perpignan.

The neighborhood of Saint-Jacques looms large in the image of Perpignan. Stories of violence and drugs in one of France’s last inner-city Gypsy communities dominate media coverage, with references to its inconvenient existence near tourist attractions and subtle warnings to avoid its narrow streets. Fear and frustration over Saint-Jacques helped elect Aliot, who profited off its chaotic image with promises of instilling discipline. Yet it’s an ever-present thorn in his side, the rampant poverty, unemployment, and school absenteeism ruining the illusion of a model city tamed by law-and-order policies.

“It’s saddening but also worrying,” said Astrid Osland. Osland has lived in Perpignan with her husband, a retired teacher who’s part of the local chapter of anti-globalization movement Attac, since 1977. She’s involved with local organizing through Casa Bicicleta, which promotes cycling.

The couple depicted a city center with shuttered storefronts and residents scared to go out after dark. “Starting at 7 pm, there are only dealers—nearly, I’d say. Everything is closed,” Osland told me at her home on a picturesque cul-de-sac outside the city center. Her coffee table was strewn with newspapers and books about left-wing politics. “That means that the National Rally didn’t succeed here by chance. It was most likely to try something new.”

Saint-Jacques comprises a tiny, clearly delineated collection of roads built in the Middle Ages. It was a Jewish neighborhood until World War II. Already a presence in the region for centuries, the Gypsies moved in as the Vichy government outlawed nomadism. As of 2018, 60 percent of Saint-Jacques households were living in poverty. Population estimates ranged from 3,000 to 7,000 that year. The community is distinct from the larger Roma population, also referred to as Gypsies, and most experts agree they don’t share the Roma’s Eastern European roots.

One afternoon, I met David Cook at Place Cassanyes, Saint-Jacques’s town square. A British audio engineer who’s lived in France for over three decades, Cook moved from Paris to Perpignan with his family almost 10 years ago. They landed in Saint-Jacques.

Cook and I meandered past buildings under construction alongside ones that had been hollowed out and abandoned. Laundry hung out of windows and dogs sat leashed in front of homes. Young men gathered around cars in Plaça de Puig, a public space that’s largely a parking lot. A young teen asked if Cook had a cigarette and chuckled when he replied that he didn’t smoke. “That’s good,” said the boy with a mix of approval and disappointment. We walked half a block up a hill and reached one of the nicest restaurants in the city, where entrées cost about $30. Rounding the corner, we suddenly found ourselves by the building housing the world-renowned Visa Pour l’Image photojournalism festival—the juxtapositions created by the small city’s extreme inequality jolting at every turn. We headed back into Saint-Jacques and stopped to see Paul Orell, a flamenco guitar maker born and raised in the neighborhood. Amid the tools and stacks of half-built guitars in his workshop, he grabbed an instrument and plucked it briefly, beautifully, as we spoke.

The destruction happening around Orell preexisted Aliot. Over 50 buildings were demolished between 2015 and 2018. The community protested and won a temporary pause, but Aliot tore down buildings around Plaça de Puig in 2021, citing safety concerns. He wants to build new housing, but distrust of the government runs high in the Gypsy community, breeding suspicion that it’s an effort to displace them.

The day’s menu was written on a chalkboard next to the sidewalk at Miam Collective. Flyers for community events hung taped to a large window. It was just past noon on a drizzly Thursday, and people were starting to trickle in for the pay-what-you-can vegetarian lunch that the community restaurant offers, aiming to make healthy food accessible to all. It operates as an association with a five-euro annual membership fee, waived for those who can’t afford it.

“When I arrived, I didn’t have the impression of being in a far-right city,” said Rémi Boher, a Miam employee who moved from the Paris region to Perpignan, his father’s birthplace, soon after Aliot’s election. “I don’t feel it on the day-to-day. It’s often in the details.”

“We avoid working with City Hall as much as possible,” added Félix Chaumont, another employee, “because if they fund us, they could use our image in their communications.” Miam doesn’t want its success to benefit Aliot. The association isn’t a political organization, but “what we do on a daily basis is solidarity, for sure,” he said. “It’s a place for mixing, and it really works. There are people with jobs, retired people, teenagers, people without steady housing.”

“We know that if there’s a protest, a lot of people are going to come eat here afterwards,” laughed Boher.

But they haven’t witnessed many actions against the far right. “If there’s something, it’s small groups on the left,” Chaumont lamented. “We haven’t seen a grand anti–far right force.”

Yet there are people trying to build that grand force of resistance. France Unbowed, whose leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, came third in the 2022 presidential election, announced an effort to open local offices in every department last year. Its first would be in Pyrénées-Orientales and placed in Perpignan.

“It’s a highly symbolic purchase in a city that’s also a symbol for the far right since it was their first big victory,” said Anais Belouassa Cherifi, who spearheaded the initiative and won a seat in the National Assembly—her first time holding elected office—as part of the New Popular Front in the recent elections. Establishing a visible presence is key to the party’s mission of building support in the city. There’s a lot of work to do: In the 2020 mayoral election, France Unbowed was part of a joint left-wing ticket called Alternative. It garnered a mere 6.5 percent of votes.

Despite the National Rally’s rebrand, “it’s our responsibility to peel back their actions and show that these are people who are dangerous,” Cherifi explained when we met in Paris just before the Perpignan office opened last fall. She pointed to the funding cuts as evidence that the party has turned its rhetoric into policy.

“There’s a true deception,” agreed Julien Berthélemy, secretary general of the General Confederation of Labor in Pyrénées-Orientales, where he’s lived for 20 years. Founded in 1895, the union is one of France’s five major labor confederations. We’re “completely engaged against the National Rally’s ideas because they divide workers,” he told me one morning in Perpignan, “and we can’t win genuine social improvements if we have one group of workers divided from another.”

Berthélemy described a city suffering from widespread precarity, arguing that the National Rally benefited from a “rejection of politics.” He mentioned the threats by autonomous far-right groups, the decentering of the city’s Catalan roots, and the budget cuts to cultural associations that help weaken Aliot’s opposition. “But, at the same time,” he continued, “the average resident would say that, overall, nothing’s changed much.” He said there’s “a big worry” that Aliot could win reelection in 2026.

Daily life continues as normal for many in Perpignan. Aliot’s moves are minor enough to go unnoticed, but substantial enough to impact the city’s most vulnerable residents and signal the National Rally’s larger policy goals. It’s a reminder that the far right can assume power in the most unassuming of ways: through low-turnout elections, low-simmering discontent, widespread disengagement, and a business-as-usual veneer, as well as through fomenting nationalist fervor and enacting sweeping reforms.

“The Perpignan people are not right-wing,” insisted Daspe, the France Unbowed organizer who received three death threats. He pointed to the abstention rate of over 50 percent in the election that brought Aliot to power. “In the end, the biggest party is the party whose supporters will vote,” he said. “History is not written. It’s being constructed, so I don’t think there’s any inevitability.”

“The far right feeds on chaos, in Perpignan as elsewhere,” added Mickael Idrac, the other France Unbowed organizer who received a death threat. “It’s up to us to ensure that there is less and less chaos. If there’s no chaos, the far right’s false business of pitting populations against each other will not hold.”