A New Home for French Socialists, on Paris’s Periphery - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/12/world/europe/france-socialists-home-paris.html
Mirroring the decline of Social Democrats across Europe, France’s Socialists failed to capitalize on anger over globalization and rising inequality, ceding those issues especially to far-right populists.
Since 2017, the Socialist Party has suffered a series of electoral defeats so disastrous that its very survival remains in doubt. The biggest beneficiary, of course, has been President Emmanuel Macron himself, a former investment banker and brief interloper with Socialists before he jettisoned them in 2017 to create his own centrist party.
The optimists cast the party’s move from Paris’s Seventh Arrondissement a year ago because of financial constraints not as a retreat but as a chance at rebirth — an opportunity to shed their image of being limousine liberals and the “gauche caviar.”
Their new home in Ivry-sur-Seine, an eastern, working-class suburb, gentrifying in pockets, which remains a stronghold of the French Communist Party, represented that aspiration, they say.
“The symbol we sought was to be able to say that we are, once again, among those we’re called to represent,” said Olivier Faure, the party’s secretary general, adding that the party’s former supporters had “sometimes felt abandoned once we were in power.”
Olivier qui ?
#socialistes #gentrification ? #banlieue