Over the decades, so many locals have left Gourlan in rural Brittany for the United States that Air France even awarded the town a miniature Statue of Liberty.
Residents are so proud of their dual citizenship that four years ago they raised funds to have the statue recast in bronze. It sits prominently in Gulin’s main square, surrounded by flagpoles flying the flags of various countries.
Yet, in the recent European Parliament elections, nearly a third of local voters chose the far-right National Rally, a French party built on strong anti-immigrant sentiment.
“This region knows what immigration means,” said Pierre-Marie Quessever, a member of the local Brittany Pan-American Association, surprised by the election result. “We are very open to all cultures.”
Also shocked by the results and concerned about the outcome of France’s legislative elections, which begin this Sunday, is the centrist mayor of Goulans, Hervé Le Floc. French President Emmanuel Macron Announcement of early elections On June 9, the far right defeated his party in the European elections.
“We all have family in America,” Mr. Flock said in his office at City Hall, which overlooks a miniature Statue of Liberty. While many immigrants stayed in the United States, others returned to Gullan with their savings to start a new life here.
“In high school, half of my friends were born in New York,” said Mr. Leflock, 61, who is also a dairy farmer.
The northwestern French region of Brittany has long been the heartland of Macron’s supporters and for years seemed like an impenetrable bulwark against the far-right movement in France. The National Rally holds just eight of the 83 seats in the regional parliament and has never won a mayoral election or a seat in the national parliament in the region.
The locals proudly call it “Brittany Exception”.
The culture of cooperation among local political parties is at odds with the divisive politics of the party, explained Loïg Chesnais-Girard, president of the regional parliament, who described the region as “extremely moderate”.
Thomas Frinault, a senior lecturer in political science at Rennes II University who has studied the history of the Rassemblement Nationale de Bretagne, said the party’s renewed popularity in the region showed it had “normalised and was becoming dominant”.
In some ways, Brittany seems to have difficulty accepting the far-right view that France has a high crime rate and too many immigrants are eating into scarce resources and jobs.
Mr. Leflock could not recall the last time a serious crime occurred in Goulans, a town of 3,800 surrounded by cattle pastures 50 minutes from the coastal city of Lorient. Unemployment is so low that nearby food processing plants sometimes have trouble finding workers, he said.
“We don’t have an immigration problem here,” he said. “We have very few foreigners here.”
But speaking to locals in bars, restaurants and cultural centers, where Guerin regularly hosts social gatherings for retirees, it was clear that far-right political views and pessimism about the state of the country had taken root. People also felt abandoned by a distant Parisian ruling class and were furious with Mr. Macron.
“He only serves rich people,” said Yolande Lester, 53, during a break at the crepe shop where she works.
“Why not try the RN?” she asked, using its French acronym for the National Union. “They’ve never run this country before.”
She added: “They couldn’t have been in a worse situation.”
It’s not that no one votes for the party here. Mr. Frino noted that the party’s voter numbers have been steadily rising. But according to Joël Sévénéant, the owner of a local radio station, few admit to voting for the party. “Right now, people are talking without restraint,” he said.
What he hears most is that life in the countryside hasn’t improved in 40 years. Gas and heating bills are rising. Local hospitals continue to lose full-time emergency services, so he was distressed when Jordan Bardella, president of the national coalition, talked about how undocumented immigrants get health care for free.
“The RN is exploiting this discontent,” Mr. Sévénéant said. “There is widespread discontent with Paris.”
Across from the town’s 16th-century Roman Catholic church, in a small bar where locals can buy newspapers and cigarettes, two men, drinking beer after a hard day’s manual labor, listed the reasons why they planned to vote for Badla’s party again.
“They commit crimes,” Thierry Beigneux, 55, said of the unsuccessful asylum seekers who are in France illegally. “Not here,” he explained. “We don’t have a lot of crime here. But in France it’s very high.”
“We don’t have immigrants here,” agreed Hervé Pensivy, 62, a building contractor. “But they will come.”
Mr. Frino, a university lecturer, explains this feeling: “Television, radio, the media and social media fuel fears. People develop a fear of these issues if they don’t confront them.”
Nathalie Guihot Vieira, a local National Alliance parliamentary candidate, acknowledged that the concern was not rooted in the reality of the region but rather a fear that these problems would arise here.
“People are worried about chaos,” she said during a brief break from a grueling two weeks of campaigning.
Because the party lacks roots in the Morbihan region of Brittany, Ms. Guihot-Vieira, a retired navy officer, had to learn on the fly how to register as a candidate and how to run for office. take over Her party is campaigning across Morbihan after the man in charge of that job was fired.
One of the party’s core principles is “national first” – reserving social benefits, subsidized housing, certain jobs and free health care for French citizens rather than non-French residents.
“We pay taxes, but we live in a medical desert and can’t find a doctor,” Ms. Guihot-Vieira said. “And yet they provide free medical care to foreigners.”
“When you talk like that, people call you a racist,” she added. “But it’s not racism, it’s the pursuit of equality.”
The National Rally was openly racist in its early years. Its founder and longtime leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, said people of different races had “different abilities and different levels of historical evolution” and was convicted several times for making anti-Semitic remarks. Publicly disparaging the Holocaust.
Since his daughter Marine became leader in 2011, she has campaigned to stamp out anti-Semitism in the party, even going so far as to expel her father.
But many people still do not believe that the Communist Party has changed fundamentally.
Alex Fruessen is one of them. He moved to Gullans for work two months ago, but he plans to make the long journey this weekend – a six-hour drive – to Paris, where he is still registered as a voter.
“I am the grandchild of immigrants. I will never vote for the National Party,” he said. “My grandparents were Auschwitz survivors.” He added that the party “goes against all French values.”
Pollsters predict a high turnout, and Mayor Mr. Flock wonders what that means for Brittany and his town.
“Are the European elections just a protest vote?” he asked, saying perhaps people would vote differently in national elections.
“But maybe,” he added, “people will continue to protest.”
