In Marseille, Macron Confronts a Potent Mix of France’s Problems

 

In Marseille, Macron Confronts a Potent Mix of France’s Problems

 

France’s second city, five years into a presidential development plan, is grappling with the social strains that have fueled protests across the country.

Protesters and the police in Marseille on Saturday. The city stands as a poignant example of mounting social and economic strains in France.Credit...Thibaud Moritz/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

By Ben Hubbard and Sophie Boutière-Damahi

Ben Hubbard and Sophie Boutière-Damahi attended demonstrations, visited Marseille neighborhoods and interviewed protesters, officials and residents.

Oct. 29, 2026, 5:03 a.m. ET

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/29/world/europe/france-marseille-macron-protests.html

 

In La Castellane, a neighborhood in the French city of Marseille famous for producing Zinedine Zidane, the soccer star, spray-painted signs advertising cocaine pointed drivers to parking lots where dealers openly sold drugs.

When we visited recently, a man in a black hoodie and face mask with a pistol visible in his open shoulder bag questioned us about why we were there. We saw no police officers.

In another area, Hairia Hamdani, 28, said her daughter loved the nearby school that had been refurbished after a visit from President Emmanuel Macron in 2021.

The neighborhood had been dangerous five years ago, she said, but the police had cracked down on crime and now she felt safer going out at night.

The two scenes illustrated the entrenched social tensions — and the efforts to fix them — that pervade Marseille, France’s second most populous city, which has been swept by the recent protests unfolding across France.

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Apartment buildings in La Castellane, a troubled neighborhood in northern Marseille. A billboard features the soccer star Zinedine Zidane, who hails from the area.Credit...Miguel Medina/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

On Oct. 17, demonstrations in Marseille gave way to riots, and hundreds of businesses were damaged or looted. A protest march this past Saturday ended with tear gas, burning dumpsters and clashes between youths and the police.

The protests began across the country last month with high schoolers decrying poor school conditions and have expanded to include a range of groups angry about rising living costs and other issues.

The government has struggled to respond, with high public debt undermining its ability to fund the welfare state and leaving little extra cash to address the protesters’ demands. Mr. Macron’s popularity has sunk as an election to choose his successor looms next spring. That could bring the far right to power.

Many of the social and economic strains that Mr. Macron’s government faces exist in condensed form in Marseille.

A Mediterranean city of about 890,000 people, it has a vibrant, diverse culture shaped by its historic role as a gateway for immigrants from North and West Africa, the Levant and elsewhere in Europe. But it is also France’s poorest metropolis, with vast inequality.

Five years ago, Mr. Macron announced an ambitious plan — Marseille en Grand, or “Marseille on a Grand Scale” — that promised 5 billion euros, about $5.6 billion, in state spending to improve the city’s health and school systems, public transit, housing and law enforcement.

“We must dream big,” Mr. Macron declared, linking progress in the city to progress for all of France.

“If we don’t succeed in Marseille, we won’t be able to make the country succeed,” he said.

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President Emmanuel Macron announcing his plan for Marseille during a three-day visit to the city in 2021.Credit...Guillaume Horcajuelo/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Mr. Macron’s plan gives specific attention to the city’s northern neighborhoods, which are generally poorer and isolated from the economic life in its historic downtown and south. The plan includes projects to strengthen law enforcement, expand public transit and refurbish substandard schools and apartment buildings.

“Life is hard at the moment,” said Khaled Abdullah, 42, an imam at a mosque in Frais Vallon, a northern neighborhood. “People struggle to finish the month, and life has become much more expensive.”

Residents in the area complained about the scarcity of employment, about residential buildings where broken elevators and water leaks were common, and about crime. Powerful drug gangs operate in the northern neighborhoods, and drug-related killings are more common there than elsewhere in the city.

Mr. Abdullah had not joined the recent demonstrations but said he supported the protesters. “Of course they have the right to protest, but not to loot,” he said.

When asked about Mr. Macron’s plan, he said he had seen little progress.

“It’s all smoke and mirrors,” he said.

 

Jean-Marc Coppola, a district mayor in northern Marseille, said the demonstrations had been exacerbated by economic precariousness and poor public services for parts of the population.

The protest movement, he said, “encapsulates all the tensions running through our society.”

Marseille is also home to tens of thousands of university students, many of whom are in low-cost programs that offer “no professional prospects,” said Michel Peraldi, an anthropologist of the city.

That has created “a state of student destitution,” he said, which “helps explain a number of phenomena we see playing out on the streets.”

During a visit to Marseille on Monday, Mr. Macron praised the security forces, promised that such unrest would happen “never again” and met with merchants whose shops had been pillaged.

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Damage in central Marseille on Oct. 18, the day after protests led to riots and looting.Credit...Thibaud Moritz/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

He said his government would respond to the “legitimate demands at the root of the social movement” and that new projects would be announced soon.

A pillar of Mr. Macron’s Marseille plan has been to improve law enforcement by installing hundreds of street cameras, enlarging the police force and equipping officers with digital investigative tools.

The regional government that includes Marseille reported that crime in the city had decreased 4.1 percent last year and arrests for drug trafficking had increased 11 percent.

Gang-related killings declined to 16 last year from their peak at 49 in 2023, which experts have attributed to increased law enforcement and the end of a bloody turf war.

But Mr. Macron’s plan has hit bumps.

In October 2024, France’s Court of Auditors, a government accountability office, released a scathing assessment saying the initiative lacked “coherence in its action plan.”

Two years in, it said, the government had spent only 1.31 percent of the funds announced.

Mr. Macron did not respond to the auditors’ report, but other officials said Marseille’s problems called for an expedited approach.

Today, a website that tracks the plan’s progress says 60 percent of the promised funds have been committed and lists dozens of transport, health, education, security and culture projects that are done, in process or planned.

Mr. Coppola, the district mayor, said he had worked in Marseille’s northern neighborhoods for decades and praised the Macron plan for addressing the area’s problems.

“Marseille is not a poor city, but it is a city of inequality,” he said. “The northern districts have been left behind for years, even decades.”

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A primary school in Marseille during Mr. Macron’s 2021 visit to the city. A number of schools have since been refurbished.Credit...Daniel Cole/Associated Press

Under the program, primary schools and sports facilities in the area had been or were slated to be upgraded, he said.

He called poor public transportation “the primary barrier to employment” in neighborhoods where half of the population doesn’t drive and said a planned extension of a tramline farther into the city’s north would help.

Recently, students in his district had protested teacher shortages and poor facilities, and to express their distress about their futures, he said.

“These are of course entirely legitimate demands, regarding their study conditions, regarding their high school, which, I would say, is not worthy of a 21st-century high school,” he said.

Ben Hubbard is the Istanbul bureau chief for The Times, covering Turkey and the surrounding region.