Macron to the rescue of Marseille, a city in permanent crisis

The visit of the French president, Emmanuel Macron, to Marseille, has something of a trip to an exotic territory, to a foreign country.

Three days.

Seven ministers, in addition to the president.

A rain of millions of euros.

And the message that France's second city needs Paris to stop its decline.

The crisis is not new.

It is explained by decades of deindustrialization, poor public management, poverty that affects a quarter of the population and cyclical waves of violence.

The most recent presidents have all stumbled upon Marseille.

The socialist governments of François Hollande, in the past decade, have already presented plans of billions to revitalize it.

Now Macron tries.

Although he was born in the north of France and educated in elite institutions in Paris, he claims to feel a particular affinity with the city: its soccer team, its history of an old global port in decline, and a culture that is the product of successive immigration.

And he has promised that Marseille "will become a capital of the Mediterranean."

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The president spoke with residents of the northern neighborhoods, gray block neighborhoods built in the 1960s and 1970s, with no metro connection to the urban center and the scene of gang battles. And he took out the checkbook: 150 million to build a new police headquarters, which in 2022 will be reinforced with 200 new agents; some 600 million euros to renovate the third of the schools that today are in a state of degradation; and funds for home renovation and public transportation. But he warned that this will be a dead letter without efficient management by local authorities.

"There is something unbearably monarchical in all this," complained the local deputy and leader of the French populist left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, referring to the image of the head of state who lands from Paris to save the provincial city. “The guy,” he added, “comes eight months before the presidential election. Everyone understands that he is on the campaign trail ”.

The city has just had a bloody summer, with a dozen murders, according to a count in the daily

, linked to drug trafficking.

Among the dead, two minors aged 14 and 17.

In addition, Marseille is still marked by the collapse on November 5, 2018 of two buildings in the central rue d'Aubagne.

Eight people died.

Later, the pandemic served to stage the rivalry between Paris and Marseille, the fiefdom of Professor Didier Raoult, an apostle of hydroxychloroquine against covid-19 and an object of devotion by many Marseillais who saw in him a symbol of provincial resistance against the technocrats of the capital.

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Macron's visit pacifies relations with local power, in the hands of the left after almost three decades controlled by the right.

It is also his first act in a political course that will conclude with the presidential elections next spring.

The debates that torment Marseille - insecurity, social exclusion, the feeling of decline - are similar to those that torment France.

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