We’ll take the Mediterranean island as a whole for this instalment of Crime and the City. Corsica has a criminal reputation to rival nearby Sicily’s. With a population of 333,000 that swells considerably in the summer months, Corsica is technically French territory, but last June, when Emmanuel Macron won a landslide victory on the mainland he didn’t win a single seat on the entire island. Corsica instead elected three parliamentarians from the autonomist Pe a Corsica (“For Corsica”) alliance. The renewed call for independence, in the countryside as much as in the island’s two major cities Ajaccio (pop. 66,000) and Bastia (pop. 43,000), was resounding. The far-right candidate Marine Le Pen touched down briefly, but was effectively chased off the island with her bodyguards getting beaten up by the Nationalists from Ghjuventu Indipendentista (Youth for Independence). She should have known better—her equally right-wing father Jean Marie was staunchly against any negotiation with the “separatists” and ran into the same sort of trouble in his day.

Via HN.