Over so many decades, so many locals have left Gourin, in rural Brittany, for the United States that Air France gifted the town a miniature Statue of Liberty.
Residents were so proud of this binational identity that they raised funds four years ago to recast the statue in bronze. It stands prominently in Gourin’s main square, surrounded by poles with international flags.
And yet, in the recent European Parliament elections, almost a third of local voters opted for the far-right National Rally party, a French party built on intense anti-immigrant sentiment.
“This is an area that knows 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.”
The centrist mayor of Gourin, Hervé Le Floc’h, was equally surprised by the results and worried about what could happen in the French legislative elections that begin on Sunday. President Emmanuel Macron announced the early elections on June 9, after the far-right defeated his party in the European elections.
“We all have family in the United States,” Floc’h said from his office in City Hall, overlooking the small Statue of Liberty. Although many of those emigrants stayed in the United States, others returned to Gourin with savings to restart their lives here.
“In high school, half of my friends were born in New York,” said Le Floc’h, 61, who is also a dairy farmer.
The northwestern region of Brittany has been the heartland of support for Macron and, for many years, a seemingly impenetrable bastion against France’s far-right movement. The National Rally holds just eight of the 83 regional council seats, and has not won a single election in the region for mayor or for a seat in the national parliament.
The locals proudly called it the “Breton exception”.
The local culture of inter-party collaboration did not fit in with the party’s politics of division, explained the president of the regional council, Loïg Chesnais-Girard. He describes the region as “furiously moderate.”
Thomas Frinault, a senior lecturer in political science at Rennes 2 University who has studied the history of the National Rally in Brittany, said the party’s newfound popularity in the region was a sign that it “has normalized and is emerging dominant.”
In one sense, Brittany would seem to be a tough sell for the far-right message that France is plagued by high crime and that too many immigrants are absorbing scarce resources and jobs.
Le Floc’h can’t remember the last time a serious crime was committed in Gourin, a town of 3,800 surrounded by cow pastures, a 50-minute drive from the coastal city of Lorient. Unemployment is so low that nearby food processing factories sometimes have trouble recruiting workers, he said.
“Here we do not face the problem of immigration,” he said. “We have very few foreigners.”
But talking to locals in bars, restaurants and at a cultural center that hosts Gourin’s regular retiree social gathering, it’s clear that the far-right’s political talking points and their bleak view of the country’s situation have taken root. . There is also a bitter sense of abandonment by the ruling class in distant Paris and a burning anger against Macron.
“It’s only for rich people,” said Yolande Lester, 53, taking a break at the creperie where she works.
“Why not try the RN?” he asked, calling the National Rally by its French initials. “They had never ruled the country before.”
And he added: “They couldn’t be worse.”
It’s not that no one here has ever voted for the party. The number of its members has increased steadily, Frinault notes. But few have admitted to voting for them, according to Joël Sévénéant, owner of the local radio station. “Now people speak without reservation,” he says.
What he hears most is the sense that life in the countryside hasn’t improved in the past 40 years. The price of gas and heating has gone up. Local hospitals keep losing their full-time emergency services, so when National Rally President Jordan Bardella talks about how undocumented immigrants can access free health care, it strikes a chord.
“The RN takes advantage of this discontent,” says Sévénéant. “There is a general satiety against Paris.”
In front of the city’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 why they intend to vote again for the Bardella party.
Speaking of rejected asylum seekers staying illegally in the country, Thierry Beigneux, 55, said: “They commit crimes.” “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 building contractor. “But they will come.”
Mr. Frinault, the university professor, explained such feelings as follows: “There is fear inspired through television, radio, the press and social networks. You have a population that, without facing these problems, develops a kind of fear of them.”
The parliamentary candidate for the local National Group, Nathalie Guihot-Vieira, recognizes that the concerns are not based on the reality of the area, but on a persistent fear that problems will appear here.
“There is a fear of chaos,” he said during a brief break from the grueling two-week campaign.
Given the party’s lack of support in this area of Brittany, called Morbihan, Mrs Guihot-Vieira, a retired naval officer, has had to learn on the job how to register as a candidate and how to campaign. She recently learned that taking control his party’s campaign efforts across Morbihan, after the person doing that job was fired.
One of the party’s central principles is “national preference”: reserving social benefits, subsidized housing, certain jobs and free access to medical treatment for French citizens and not non-French residents.
“We pay taxes, we live in medical deserts and we can’t find doctors,” Guihot-Vieira said, “and yet they give free medical treatment to foreigners.”
“When you talk like that, people call you racist,” he added. “But it’s not racism, it’s a call for equality.”
In its early years, the National Rally party was openly racist. Its founder and longtime leader, Jean Marie Le Pen, claimed that people of different races “do not have the same abilities or the same level of historical evolution” and was repeatedly condemned for making anti-Semitic comments and publicly disparaging the Holocaust.
Since his daughter Marine took over leadership of the party in 2011, she has worked to eradicate anti-Semitism from the party, even going so far as to expel her father.
Still, many remain unconvinced that the party has fundamentally changed.
Alex Flusen is one of them. He moved to Gourin for work just two months ago, but plans to make the long trip this weekend (six hours by car) to Paris, where he is still registered to vote.
“I am the grandson of immigrants. “I could never vote for the RN,” she stated. “My grandparents survived Auschwitz.” The party, he added, “goes against all the values of France.”
Pollsters predict high turnout, and Floc’h, the mayor, wonders what that will mean for Brittany and his small town.
“Were the European elections just a protest vote?” he asked. Perhaps people will vote differently when it comes to national elections, he said.
“But maybe,” he added, “people will continue to protest.”