Over the decades, so many locals have left the ancient forests of rural Brittany for the United States that Air France awarded the town a miniature Statue of Liberty.
The dual-citizen residents are so proud that they raised funds four years ago to have the statue recast in bronze. It is prominently located in the main square of Quran and is surrounded by columns flying international flags.
However, in recent European Parliament elections, nearly a third of local voters chose the far-right National Rally, a French party built on strong anti-immigration sentiment.
“This region knows what immigration means,” said Pierre-Marie Quesseveur, a member of the local Breton Pan-American Association, who expressed surprise at the election results. “We are very open to all cultures.”
Hervé Le Floc’h, a centrist mayor from the Koran, was equally shocked by the results and worried about what might happen in France’s legislative elections, which begin this Sunday. French President Emmanuel Macron announced snap elections on June 9 after far-right parties defeated his party in the European elections.
“We all have family in the United States,” Mr. Flock said in his City Hall office overlooking the miniature Statue of Liberty. While many of these immigrants stayed in the United States, others returned to Quran with their savings and started anew there.
“In high school, half of my friends were born in New York,” said Mr. LeFrock, 61, who is also a dairy farmer.
The northwestern Brittany region has been a heartland of Macron support and for years a seemingly impenetrable bulwark against France’s far-right movement. The National Assembly holds only 8 of the 83 seats in the regional parliament, and the region has never won a single mayoral election or an election for a national parliamentary seat.
Locals proudly call it the “Breton exception”.
Loïg Chesnais-Girard, president of the regional assembly, explained that the culture of cooperation between local parties does not match the divisive politics of the parties. He called the area “extremely benign.”
Thomas Frinault, senior lecturer in politics at the University of Rennes 2, who has studied the history of national rallies in Brittany, said the party’s new popularity in the region showed that the party “has normalized and is taking a dominant position”.
In some ways, Brittany appears to be struggling to accept the far-right message that France is plagued by high crime rates and that too many immigrants are taking away scarce resources and jobs.
Mr Le Floc’h could not imagine the last time a serious crime had been committed in Gulin. With unemployment so low, nearby food processing plants sometimes struggle to recruit workers, he said.
“We don’t have an immigration problem here,” he said. “We have very few foreigners here.”
But talking to locals in bars, restaurants and the cultural center that hosts regular social gatherings for retirees in Gulin, it’s clear that far-right political discourse and its grim view of the state of the country has taken hold. There is also a bitter feeling of abandonment by the distant Parisian ruling class, as well as intense anger towards Mr Macron.
“He’s only for rich people,” said Yolande Lester, 53, during a break at the creperie where she works.
“Why not try a registered nurse?” she asked, using the French abbreviation for the national rally. “They’ve never run this country before.”
She added, “It couldn’t be worse.”
That’s not to say no one here voted for the party. Mr. Frino noted that their numbers are rising steadily. But local radio station owner Joël Sévénéant said few people acknowledged voting for them. “Right now, people are talking without restraint,” he said.
What he hears most is the feeling that life in rural areas has not improved in 40 years. The cost of natural gas and heating has gone up. Local hospitals continue to lose full-time emergency services, so when national rally president Jordan Bardella talked about how undocumented immigrants can get free medical care, it hit a nerve.
“Registered nurses are taking advantage of this dissatisfaction,” Mr. Severnet said. “People are generally fed up with Paris.”
Opposite the town’s 16th-century Roman Catholic church, in a small bar where locals can buy newspapers and cigarettes, two men, drinking beers after a day of manual labor, listed their intentions to vote for Bardera again. political party reasons.
“They commit crimes,” Thierry Beigneux, 55, said of failed asylum seekers who are in the country illegally. “Not here,” he explained. “We don’t have a high crime rate here. But in France.
“We have no immigrants here,” agrees Hervé Pensivy, 62, a construction contractor. “But they will come.”
Mr. Frino, a university lecturer, explained the feeling this way: “Television, radio, the media and social media inspire fear in people. A group of people develops a fear of these problems without facing them.
National Rally candidate for local parliament Nathalie Giot-Vieira admitted that the concerns were not based on the reality of the region but on fears that these problems would arise here.
“People are worried about chaos,” she said during a break from a grueling two-week campaign.
Given the party’s lack of organization in this region of Brittany called Morbihan, Ms. Giault-Vieira, a retired naval officer, had to learn on the fly how to register as a candidate and how to run. She only recently learned that she had taken over the party’s campaign in Morbihan after the man responsible for the job was fired.
One of the party’s core principles is “national priority” – preserving social benefits, subsidized housing, certain jobs and free health care for French citizens rather than non-French residents.
“We pay taxes, we live in a medical desert and we can’t find a doctor,” Ms. Guillot-Vieira said, “but they provide free medical care to foreigners.”
“When you talk like this, people call you a racist,” she added. “But this is not racism, it is a demand for fairness.”
In its early years, the National Rally Party was openly racist. Its founder and long-time leader Jean-Marie Le Pen has said people of different races “do not have the same abilities nor the same level of historical evolution” and has been repeatedly criticized for making anti-Semitic remarks and publicly downplaying the Holocaust and was convicted.
Since his daughter Marlene took over the party leadership in 2011, she has campaigned to stamp out anti-Semitism in the party, even expelling her father.
Still, many remain unconvinced that the party has fundamentally changed.
Alex Frousen is one of them. He moved to Koran for work two months ago, but he plans a long trip this weekend – a six-hour drive – to Paris, where he is still registered to vote.
“I’m the grandson of immigrants. I would never vote for a registered nurse,” he said. “My grandparents both survived Auschwitz.” He added that the party “goes against all French values.”
Pollsters predict a high turnout, and the mayor, Mr. Flocker, wants to know what that means for Brittany and his town.
“Are the European elections just a protest vote?” he asked. He said maybe people would vote differently in national elections.
“But maybe,” he added, “people will continue to protest.”
