Catherine Z. Sameh is associate professor of Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of California-Irvine. She is the author of Axis of Hope: Iranian Women’s Rights Activism across Borders (University of Washington Press, 2019).
The first round of the local elections took place against a backdrop of widespread creeping fascism in France and comes after a brutal offensive by the far right, during which the traditional ‘Republican’ right has decisively broken from much of its historical framework and values.