With the second highest abstention rate in its history in Sunday’s election (24), France faces additional difficulties in convincing young people to vote.
In the clash that gave Emmanuel Macron his second victory over Marine Le Pen, the 18-24 age group was the least present in the voting booths.
The problem, which is even greater on the outskirts of Paris, is in the sights of a 24-year-old young journalist.
Lauren Lolo (“everyone thinks it’s a nickname, but it’s my last name!”), daughter of immigrants from Côte d’Ivoire, is co-founder of the organization Cité des Chances (city of opportunities). Next to her is childhood friend Brandy Boloko, 24, whose parents migrated from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
More than simply preaching to young people in the Parisian suburbs about the importance of voting, Lauren and her colleagues built a project to bring to the communities where they also come a clearer notion of what their country’s political life is and how it is done.
She grew up in Clichy-sous-Bois, where the death of two teenagers, electrocuted while fleeing the police, sparked the arson protests of 2005. .”
Today, the city councilor for the environment in the city of Fosses, on the outskirts of Paris, is making plans to carry out her political awareness: “I would like to be Minister of Education.”
What led you to create the Cité des Chances association? At the age of 16, I had surgery to correct a double scoliosis in my spine, but there was a mistake that left me with no movement in my legs. I had to stay in the hospital for six months and ended up being transferred to a school in the 16th arrondisement, one of the poshest neighborhoods in Paris. I then started taking classes with young people who lived in that region, people from other social classes, classes that had a lot of discussions. And I was impressed how those teenagers knew names of deputies, bills, while I didn’t care about any of that.
I asked these colleagues how they knew these things, and they said they learned at home from their parents. My parents, who immigrated from Côte d’Ivoire 30 years ago, had no way of teaching me that, I had to teach them later. And all my friends and colleagues were also children of immigrants who had never been introduced to politics.
I was 16, and I thought, well, two years from now we’re all going to have the right to vote, and while my 16th graders will be able to make better choices for them, I wouldn’t have that opportunity. I started talking about this type of inequality with my friend Brandy Boloko, who would become co-creator and president of the organization, and we decided to mobilize to try to fix this inequality.
Was there no contact with politics at your school in the periphery? He restricted himself to moral and civic education classes, which were very theoretical, uninteresting — we didn’t even need to take an exam. They taught what the Fifth Republic is, they talked a lot about secularism, but nothing about other political matters.
And what changed after the experience in the richest neighborhood? When I returned to my school, I started to propose activities where we could get to know the culture of our parents’ countries. I started doing voluntary service at the city hall and got to know better how it works. I was part of the Île de France Regional Youth Council [região onde fica Paris] and then we decided to create the Cité des Chances.
How was that? To reach all young people, regardless of social class, we started going to all secondary schools and proposing activities. One of them is what we call the Citizen Journey, in three stages: in the first, at age 15, participants choose a current topic they like and give a five-minute speech about it on a stage. We follow these speeches and help them build arguments and have confidence in themselves. They often deal with environmental issues, bullying, gender inequality, racism.
Then, at 16, we do a parliamentary simulation, in which we recreate the entire process of creating and voting on laws. They write the laws and debate them. There are deputies for and against the laws. The last one we did was about making voting mandatory or not. We also have groups that play the role of journalists, lobbyists, companies or the population. The idea is to create a mini-National Assembly.
Between 50 and 60 young people participate in each parliamentary semester, which are now in their fourth year. We discussed issues that have to do with their reality: at a school close to the airport, the issue was whether air traffic should be reduced. We always choose subjects that the students are interested in, some problem of their daily life, so that it is not an abstract discussion.
Finally, we visit the Regional Councils and the National Assembly, where we speak with deputies. Going in person helps to demystify the institution, to make it less unattainable. It’s common for students to get inside and say “ah, it’s so small…”. We also try to choose to talk to deputies who have not gone through big schools or come from super-traditional families, so that students can think “then maybe someday I can also be a deputy”.
Are you generally well received? Is there a partnership with these institutions? There is no formal partnership, but we need authorization from one of the deputies to make these visits, and they have a limited number of authorizations per year. But in general they accept. We have already spoken with members of the LREM [partido de Macron]from France Unsubmissive [do ultraesquerdista Jean-Luc Mélenchon]from MoDem, the party of François Bayrou [candidato à Presidência da França nas eleições de 2002, 2007 e 2012].
So they end up working with various parties. Yes, because we don’t tell people who to vote for. What we do is help them discover the system, learn how it works. Of course, we are in favor of everyone having the same opportunities, by reducing inequalities more generally, so we are aligned more to the left. But we have no right to say how to vote. We are not a political party, we try to remain neutral as much as possible.
Even with Marine Le Pen’s party? (Laughter) Then it would be a little bizarre…
Did Le Pen’s candidacy stir up interest in your work? Not a lot. In fact, we carried out another action involving associations in 16 cities. The idea was to present the elections, why it is important to vote, what are the real powers of the president, of the National Assembly. We spoke to about 250 people aged between 17 and 25 from the main cities on the outskirts of Paris and 90% of them did not know the power of legislative elections. Some did not even know that they are direct elections, that deputies can control the government.
The objective is to fight against abstention. And, not necessarily because of our work, but we were pleasantly surprised to see that this time the number of abstentions was a little lower than usual in these cities.
The thing is, with a Macron-Le Pen dispute, people would say: “ah, so that’s it, the media has already decided, it’s all the same, it doesn’t matter whether you vote or not.” It’s hard for people to see what impact their votes might have. Then you think of Mélenchon, who lacked 400,000 votes to go to the second round, and that would mean just one vote in each electoral section in France. In other words, each one makes a difference.
And what are the big challenges? There is an increase in individualism. The person thinks that he will work, mind his own business and that politics has nothing to do with him. What we tell them is, well, even if you’re not about politics, politics is about you. When we were in lockdown in the pandemic, whether you voted or not, it affected everyone. When you go to a hospital, if there is a shortage of professionals, it is also political. If the school has been without a teacher for three months, it is political.
Many people underestimate what Marine Le Pen could do if elected. We need to explain what the powers of a president in the Fifth Republic are: who has the power to dissolve the National Assembly, who has the power to pass laws, to hold referendums, etc. These are things that the other candidates obviously say they won’t do or have, but with Marine Le Pen it’s different. She is not a candidate like the others, she could jeopardize our democracy. Even with a left-wing majority in the Assembly, that would not be able to stop it.
What was your strategy to make this clearer? What we are trying to explain is that when people on the periphery needed to mobilize to distribute food, the state could take care of it, but chose not to. When students had to enter these lines in order to eat, it was a political choice not to increase their scholarships. People cannot imagine that another system is possible.
Politics is the organization of society and it is up to us to discuss which society we want and how we are going to divide the State’s money, because we also pay all taxes. In the end, it’s not easy, but we managed to get some people to go to the polling stations, because they were able to reflect on this process.
What do you think Macron’s priorities should be for the next five years? I think it should be educational inequality. The reform he made in 2018 reinforced this inequality. It would be good to take measures so that universities receive more and better people who come from the periphery.
What is Macron’s predominant perception in these encounters? That he contributed to rising inequality, that he didn’t create jobs as he promised he would by giving money to big companies with that argument. We, in the peripheries, saw clearly how this happened, because people were left without a job and without the chance to study, because they were barred by this reform that made admission to the university difficult.
There is also the type of young person who believes in a kind of Macron’s “American dream”, that if you work hard you will get what you want, even if you have to work 12 hours a day as an app driver. It is mainly the boys, who thought that Macron would be there to “help us”, but who saw another reality. And the Muslims, who have found themselves mistaken for terrorists by the president — even though people usually talk about Marine Le Pen when it comes to that.
There is also police violence. I grew up seeing police violence, as did my friends, and it was evident to other people with the Yellow Vests. We, from the periphery, were aware of this. When it was just us, the impression of others was that we were “asking”, that we had done something wrong. But when they saw the police assaulting people in large, mostly peaceful demonstrations, it was clear what the problem was. In the peripheries, black people and people of Arab descent begin to be approached at 13, 11 years of age.
And do you intend to continue in politics? I don’t know why everyone asks me that question (laughs)! Yes, but I would love to be a member of the Île de France regional government one day… and why not Minister of Education?
X-RAY | LAUREN LOLO, 24
Daughter of Ivory Coast immigrants, she grew up on the outskirts of Paris. At 16, she was transferred to a school in an upscale area of the French capital and discovered, under the layer of educational inequality, an interest in politics. She is co-founder of the organization Cité des Chances, which seeks to convince young people to vote, and municipal councilor for the environment of the city of Fosses.
