Last month, Sophie-Laurence Roy, a Parisian conservative lawyer from Burgundy, decided to cross the political divide in postwar France and join a nationalist far-right political movement that looked poised to win Sunday’s parliamentary election. Dominate.
“I realized that if I didn’t serve this great movement of change that was the national rally, I would blame myself for the rest of my life,” she said over a meal of pig intestine sausage in a café in Chablis. The town is famous for its fine white wines. “It’s now or never.”
So on June 9, Ms. Roy, 68, abandoned her longstanding center-right political family, the Republican Party, whose beliefs can be traced to wartime hero de Gaulle, to support Marine Le Pen’s far-right party. Its roots are quasi-fascism.
How can she bridge such a chasm? “My problem is not the past, it’s tomorrow,” Ms. Roy said scornfully. “People are suffering.”
Some 9.3 million people voted for the National Assembly in the first round of elections last weekend, more than double the 4.2 million in the first round of parliamentary elections in 2022. Recipients, young people as well as old people, women and men. Tired of the status quo, they come together and roll the dice for change.
Now Ms Le Pen’s party – one that has softened its image and smoothed its message but retained its core anti-immigration and eurosceptic credo – looks set to become France’s largest after the second round of voting party, even if it now looks unlikely to win an outright majority.
It is not enough to say that voting for the far right has become taboo. It collapsed amid a wave of national rally support.
As a result, tensions increased across the country. The Interior Ministry announced that 30,000 police officers would be deployed on Sunday “to prevent the risk of riots.”
Residents of this sparsely populated region of France – the Yonne region in northwestern Burgundy has only about 335,000 residents – describe what is happening to their communities as “desertification,” by which they mean the hollowing out of services and lives.
Schools are closed. Train stations are closed. The post office is closed. Doctors and dentists leave. Cafes and small convenience stores have closed, squeezed by big-box stores. People need to seek further services, jobs and food. Many people travel in old cars, but authorities encourage them to switch to electric vehicles, but the price of electric vehicles is far beyond their affordability.
Meanwhile, gas and electricity bills have soared since the war in Ukraine, leading some to turn off their heating last winter. They feel invisible and just getting by; they see President Macron on television explaining the vital importance of abstract policies such as Europe’s “strategic autonomy.” That’s not their concern.
What followed was a nationwide rally saying the focus was on people, not ideas and, most importantly, their purchasing power.
“My party is rooted in this territory and it is not trying to deliver a moral lesson to the world, as our president does,” Ms Roy said.
The widespread unease is not always easy to understand. The beautiful rolling hills of the Yonne River, the rows of Chablis vines on the cliffs above the Seram River, and the golden wheat fields in the afternoon sun bring no excitement. However, the discontent brewing on French soil was deeper than meets the eye.
Like most French towns and villages, Chablis has a war memorial in its main square. “A toast from Chablis to the glorious dead” reads the inscription, which lists 13 deaths in the war with Germany in 1870-71, 76 in the First World War, 2 4 deaths in the World War, 2 deaths in the Indochina War and 1.
The French flag and the blue-and-gold EU flag fly above the monument, symbolizing the commitment to ending the war through European integration, a process that erased borders from 1945 and provided France with an ideological framework and moral foundation.
Now this framework and foundation are shaky.
The nation rallied to return power to the state. It wants to tighten the EU’s open internal borders to slow migration. It is prepared to mythologize the country’s greatness, albeit with less dazzling scapegoating than the hysterical businessmen who plunged the continent into war in the 20th century.
The ground for such demands is fertile. “We have a feeling of being forgotten in the French heartland,” said André Villiers, a centrist in Macron’s party and Roy’s opponent in Sunday’s runoff. “What you’re seeing in the surge in rallies across the country is anger and alienation.”
Mr Villiers, 69, is a sitting member of the National Assembly since 2017.
Nearby is the 1,000-year-old Vezelay Abbey, said to contain the relics of Mary Magdalene. It has long been an important pilgrimage site associated with miracles. Given the results of the first round of voting in his constituency, Mr Villiers may need one.
“Macron is at a low point,” he said. “People want him gone, that he’s turned the page, but that doesn’t help.”
In the first round of voting, Mr Villiers received 29.3% of the vote and Ms Roy 44.5%. The left-wing candidate, who has now withdrawn and urged his supporters to use their votes to block the national rally, won 19.5% of the vote. Ms. Roy is the favorite, although the result may be close.
In Avalon, near Vézelay, I met Pascal Tissier, 64, who had recently retired after working as a traveling salesman. He voted for Mr Villiers in the first round, “but now I’m tempted to vote for the National Assembly because things are happening that have been heating up for a long time.”
“What?” I asked.
“A few months ago, I cut off the heat in my house because the bills were out of the question,” he said. “The bus service has been cancelled. I have to travel 45 minutes to get to Tonnerre because the tax office here is closed. It’s simple: people feel belittled by Macron.
Life has become more difficult in other ways. His father is 90 and lives alone in Rouvray, 12 miles away. Mr. Tissier brings him food every two days because the only remaining food store in his father’s neighborhood closed a few months ago. A local doctor retired this year.
“The government is indifferent to all this,” Mr. Tissier said. “That’s weird.”
Across the country, national rallies stepped into this vacuum. The party says it has moved on from its xenophobic, bigoted past, but every so often, including in the Yonne department, old tropes resurface, rising like the gloved arm of Dr. Strangelove.
Last week, another sitting member of the Yonne constituency, National Rally candidate Daniel Grenon, declared that “there is no place for North Africans in high offices.” He was apparently referring to French people of North African descent or dual citizenship. citizen. The secretary of the Socialist Party of Yonne immediately sued him for inciting hatred and discrimination.
National rally leader Jordan Bardella, 28, a moderate who has tried to distance the party from overt bigotry on the campaign trail, said in a television interview that Glennon’s statement “Very despicable.” Asked whether he would continue to support the candidate, Mr Bardera said he would no longer serve as a member of the National Assembly group in the National Assembly if Mr Glennon was re-elected.
Another National Rally MP and candidate, Roger Chudeau, infuriated Ms Le Pen last week when he said former Education Minister Najat Valloud Belkason, who has dual French and Moroccan citizenship, (Najat Vallaud-Belkacem) “The secondary schools were destroyed” and ministry posts should be left to “the French, that was the last word.”
“I am shocked by our colleague Chudeau,” Ms Le Pen said. Yet claims that immigrants dilute French roots remain a core message of her party.
Mr Villiers believes the threat to the republic from national gatherings remains real. “The distance between us and the bomb is very short,” he said. “We know how this starts and how it ends. I will fight to the end.
He called Ms Roy’s switch from the Republican Party to the national rally a “serious moral abdication”.
In Chablis, a winemaker city that relies on exports for much of its revenue, the message of national rallies worrying some. “Closing borders doesn’t work for us,” said Damien Leclerc, general manager of La Chablisienne, a large wine cooperative. Last year, 62% of its $67 million in sales came from exports.
Winemakers rely on the outside world in other ways, too. “We need migrant workers to do all the physical work,” Mr Leclerc said. “We need them to weed, prune the vines and build pergolas, jobs that the French don’t usually want to do.”
Ridial Diamé, 38, a Senegalese worker, was taking a break for lunch when I found him in a Chablis vineyard on a steep hillside. It was noon. He starts work early, mainly weeding at an estate called Domaine Goulley, where chemical sprays are not used. He is Muslim, has a wife and two children in Senegal, has previously worked in Spain and now has a temporary contract in Chablis.
“It’s very good work,” he said. “I work 35 hours a week and make about $13 an hour; we get three days off. I stay as long as I can.
What does he think about anti-immigration policies rallied across the country?
“It’s fun,” he said. “The French didn’t want to do the work, so we did it. Then they said they didn’t want us!
