Over the decades, so many locals have left Gourin in rural Brittany for the United States that Air France gave the town a miniature Statue of Liberty.
The binational residents were so proud that they raised funds four years ago to have the statue recast in bronze. It stands in a prominent position, in Gourin’s main square, surrounded by poles bearing international flags.
What’s more, in the recent European Parliament elections, nearly a third of local voters chose the far-right National Rally, a French party built on fierce anti-immigration views.
“This is a region that understands what it means to be an immigrant,” said Pierre-Marie Quesseveur, a member of the local Brittany TransAmerica association, who expressed surprise at the election results. “We are very open to all cultures.”
Also stunned by the results, and worried about what might happen in the French legislative elections starting this Sunday, is the centrist mayor of Gourin, Hervé Le Floc’h. President Emmanuel Macron announce surprise election on June 9, after the far-right defeated his party in the European elections.
“We all have family in the United States,” Mr. Floc’h said from his office in city hall, which overlooks the miniature Statue of Liberty. While many of those migrants stayed in the United States, others returned to Gourin with hatching eggs to restart life here.
“In high school, half of my friends were born in New York,” said Mr. Le Floc’h, 61, also a dairy farmer.
The northwestern region of Brittany was once a heartland of Mr. Macron’s support and for years a seemingly impenetrable bulwark against France’s far-right movement. The national protest holds only eight of the 83 seats in the regional council, and the region has not won a single election for mayor or a seat in the National Assembly.
Locals proudly call it “the Brittany exception”.
The culture of local cooperation between parties is incompatible with the party’s divisive politics, explains regional council president Loïg Chesnais-Girard, calling the region “fiercely moderate.”
Thomas Frinault, a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Rennes 2 who has studied the history of the Rally National in Brittany, said the party’s recent rise in the region was a sign that it had “normalised and is emerging as dominant”.
In some ways, Brittany seems like a tough sell on the far-right’s message that France is plagued by high crime rates and that too many immigrants are taking advantage of resources and jobs. make it scarce.
Mr. Le Floc’h cannot remember the last time there was a serious crime in Gourin, a town of 3,800 people surrounded by cow pastures and a 50-minute drive from the coastal city of Lorient. He said unemployment is so low that nearby food processing plants sometimes have trouble finding workers.
“We don’t have an immigration problem here,” he said. “We have very few foreigners here.”
But speaking to locals in bars, restaurants and a cultural centre that hosts regular social gatherings for Gourin’s pensioners, it is clear that their far-right political views and bleak outlook on the state of the country have taken root. There is also a sense of bitterness about the abandonment of the ruling class in far-flung Paris and a burning anger at Mr Macron.
“He’s only for rich people,” said Yolande Lester, 53, taking a break from the creperie where she works.
“Why not try the RN?” she asked, referring to the National Rally by its French acronym. “They’ve never run a country before.”
“They couldn’t be any worse,” she added.
It’s not like no one here has ever voted for the party. Mr. Frinault noted that the party’s voter base has grown steadily. But according to Joël Sévénéant, owner of a local radio station, very few people admitted to voting for the party. He said, “Now, people are talking without restraint.”
What he hears most is the feeling that life in the countryside has not improved in 40 years. Gas and heating costs have increased. Local hospitals continue to lose full-time emergency services, so when National Rally president Jordan Bardella spoke about how undocumented immigrants can access medical care free, that touched a nerve.
“RN is surfing this discontent,” said Mr. Sévénéant. “There is a general distaste for Paris.”
Opposite the town’s 16th-century Roman Catholic church, inside a small bar where locals can buy newspapers and cigarettes, two men drinking beer after a long day of manual labor listed the reasons they intended to vote again for Mr Bardella’s party.
“They commit crimes,” said Thierry Beigneux, 55, of the failed asylum seekers who remain in the country illegally. “Not here,” he explained. “We don’t have much crime here. But in France.”
“We don’t have immigrants here,” agreed Hervé Pensivy, 62, a construction contractor. “But they will come.”
Mr. Frinault, a university lecturer, explained those feelings like this: “There is a fear that is being stoked through television, radio, newspapers and social media. You have a segment of the population that, without being confronted with these issues, develops a kind of fear of them.”
Local National Assembly candidate for the Parliament seat, Nathalie Guihot-Vieira, admits that the worries are not grounded in the reality of the region but are due to a gnawing fear that problems will emerge here .
“People are afraid there will be chaos,” she said during a brief respite from a tense two-week election campaign.
Because the party has yet to gain a foothold in this region of Brittany, known as Morbihan, Ms Guihot-Vieira, a retired naval officer, had to learn how to register and campaign. She only recently learned that she take over her party’s campaign efforts across Morbihan, after the jobber was fired.
One of the party’s central tenets is “national priority” – reserving social benefits, housing subsidies, certain jobs and access to free medical treatment for French citizens but not non-French residents.
“We pay taxes, and we live in a medical desert and can’t find doctors, but they give free medical treatment to foreigners,” said Guihot-Vieira.
She added: “When you talk like this, people call you a racist. “But that’s not racism, that’s a fair request.”
In its early years, the National Rally was openly racist. Its founder and longtime leader, Jean Marie Le Pen, claimed that people of different races “do not have the same abilities, nor the same historical level of evolution,” and was repeatedly convicted of making anti-Semitic and anti-racist comments. publicly minimized the Holocaust.
Since his daughter Marine took over as party leader in 2011, she has worked to eliminate anti-Semitism from the party, even expelling her father.
However, many people still do not believe that the party has fundamentally changed.
Alex Flusen is one of them. He only moved to Gourin for work two months ago, but he is planning to make the long trip this weekend – six hours by car – to Paris, where he is still registered to vote.
“I am the grandchild of immigrants. I could never vote for RN,” he said. “My grandparents both survived Auschwitz.” He added that the party “goes against every French value.”
Pollsters predicted a high turnout, and Mr. Floc’h, the mayor, wondered what that would mean for Brittany and his small town.
“Are the European elections just a protest vote?” he asked. Maybe people would vote differently when it was a national election, he said.
“But maybe,” he added, “people will continue to protest.”
