diff --git a/docs/news.rst b/docs/news.rst
index a0f0c5697..d79844ed2 100644
--- a/docs/news.rst
+++ b/docs/news.rst
@@ -6,6 +6,12 @@ Release notes
 .. note:: Scrapy 1.x will be the last series supporting Python 2. Scrapy 2.0,
           planned for Q4 2019 or Q1 2020, will support **Python 3 only**.
 
+Scrapy 1.7.2 (2019-07-23)
+-------------------------
+
+Fix Python 2 support (:issue:`3889`, :issue:`3893`, :issue:`3896`).
+
+
 Scrapy 1.7.1 (2019-07-18)
 -------------------------
 
diff --git a/scrapy/utils/conf.py b/scrapy/utils/conf.py
index 26d66eaf8..fb7ca3310 100644
--- a/scrapy/utils/conf.py
+++ b/scrapy/utils/conf.py
@@ -1,10 +1,13 @@
 import os
 import sys
 import numbers
-import configparser
 from operator import itemgetter
 
 import six
+if six.PY2:
+    from ConfigParser import SafeConfigParser as ConfigParser
+else:
+    from configparser import ConfigParser
 
 from scrapy.settings import BaseSettings
 from scrapy.utils.deprecate import update_classpath
@@ -94,7 +97,7 @@ def init_env(project='default', set_syspath=True):
 def get_config(use_closest=True):
     """Get Scrapy config file as a ConfigParser"""
     sources = get_sources(use_closest)
-    cfg = configparser.ConfigParser()
+    cfg = ConfigParser()
     cfg.read(sources)
     return cfg