Two sites have become emblematic of all of Mayotte's crises. Two places for Marine Le Pen to revive her well-honed rhetoric, mixing emotion, indignation and condemnation, in a territory where she achieved some of her best results in the 2022 French presidential election (59.10% in the second round). Visiting this French Indian Ocean department to support her Rassemblement National (RN, far-right) party's list for the June 9 European elections, led by its president Jordan Bardella, Le Pen followed her main theme: Telling the inhabitants of Mayotte that they are "those among the French who suffer the most," and that they have been "abandoned" by the government, despite the "chaos that has set in" due to illegal immigration and insecurity. These are themes that she has also transposed to the national level.
On Saturday, April 20, the president of the RN group of MPs at the Assemblée Nationale first chose to visit the stadium in the city of Mamoudzou's Cavani neighborhood, where a camp of African migrants had been dismantled; before meeting on Sunday with local residents who were continuing to man a roadblock at the Ngwézi crossroads in the south of the island. This was where, in February, demonstrators had set up three welded barriers on the road, blocking traffic to demand that a state of emergency be declared on the island.
At the head of a group of around 60 "mothers" from the Cavani citizens' collective, waving small French flags, Le Pen walked up the street alongside the stadium, ignoring the migrants from countries in Africa' Great Lakes region and Somalia: Some 200 to 500 asylum seekers and refugees who had been expelled from the sporting venue. They were now living on the streets; sleeping on the ground, on cardboard boxes, woven mats or foam mattresses; and cooking meager meals on makeshift braziers. They had no running water or toilets. During the day, they would seek out any shady spot they could find to escape the scorching sun.
The Cavani collective has decried an "unacceptable situation," "delinquency" and "inhuman conditions." Convinced that the regional health agency "isn't telling the whole story," the residents have become worried about the risk of a cholera epidemic brought by these migrants who arrived in kwassa-kwassa – small boats – via the neighboring island nation of the Comoros. Addressing the members of this neighborhood collective, Le Pen laid the blame on France's successive governments. She pointed out that the people of Mayotte "accept things that no other French person would accept." According to the far-right MP, the situation in front of the Cavani stadium would be the result of "bad decisions" made by the government, which was "incapable of showing authority."
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