Sitting at his kitchen table in a remote farmhouse in the Morvan hills of Burgundy, with a calculator, bills and debts piled up in front of him, Jean-Marc, a 50-year-old Charolais cattle farmer, had decided to vote for the far-right Front National leader, Marine Le Pen, for the first time this weekend.
“A whole French way of life is under threat,” he said, looking at an old photograph of his father working the land with a horse-drawn plough. “I work 70 hours a week and I can’t make a profit from my animals. It’s misery. I’ll be in debt until I die. And if we replace the French with immigrants, this country’s whole identity will change. We’ve got to protect the French.”
Outside, his herd of 160 neatly brushed prime cattle were ready to go out to pasture on his meadows. The farmer, who used to vote for the right’s Nicolas Sarkozy, depends on EU subsidies for survival. “Without subsidies, I wouldn’t exist, I’d be finished,” he said.
But he was proudly voting for Le Pen, who wants France to leave the EU. “Subsidies are going down and I’m afraid we might lose them one day anyway,” he said. There was “more and more talk of votes for Le Pen” in farming communities, but he still did not want his real name published. In the countryside, where everyone knows everyone else, he felt it was “better to be discreet”.
As Le Pen ramps up her hardline security and anti-immigration message in the final days before Sunday’s first-round vote, she is in part appealing to those in rural communities where her support base has been growing fastest. After a police officer was shot dead on the Champs Élysées on Thursday night in an attack claimed by Islamic State, Le Pen cancelled her last day’s campaign events. She said there must be a crackdown on “Islamic fundamentalism” in France.
Her party’s central message of keeping France for the French – giving priority to French people over non-nationals in jobs, housing and welfare, as well as a ban on religious symbols, including the Muslim headscarf, from all public places – has a resonance in rural communities, even where immigration is very scarce.
Le Pen is looking to the countryside as she fights to mobilise her full voter base. Her poll figures have dipped and she and three other candidates – the centrist Emmanuel Macron, the rightwing François Fillon and the hard-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon – are now so close it is impossible to predict which two will proceed to the second round.
Nièvre, the poorest département in Burgundy, is a traditional heartland of the French left. For 40 years it was the rural power base of the former Socialist president François Mitterrand, who was mayor of the small town of Chäteau-Chinon for 20 years.
“This place has been leftwing since the French revolution,” one local Socialist politician boasted, adding that Nièvre was a focal point for the French resistance during the second world war. And yet, the Front National more than doubled its vote here in the previous regional elections, and it is here in Burgundy that Le Pen is hoping for some of her highest scores.
Le Pen’s rural target is not just farmers, who are shrinking in number in France and represent about 1% of the electorate. Her base comprises people living in modest towns and country villages far away from big cities, who have felt the sharp edge of France’s decades of mass unemployment, who have seen factories close and local shops and services disappear, in places where the population is ageing, young people are leaving and those who stay have to drive long distances to see a doctor, or sometimes even to post a letter.
Le Pen deliberately combined her vast urban campaign rallies with small-scale appearances in denim jeans at meetings in village squares and barns, appealing to the people she says live in a “forgotten France” neglected by the “globalised elite” of cosmopolitan cities. That rift between what is seen as a neglected France on the periphery and faraway “bubble” of the big cities is where she hopes to make her biggest gains.
“People have had enough, they want to kick the system”, sighed one shop worker in Château-Chinon. “Things have got to change,” added a retired factory worker. “The political class are rotten to the core. All you’re going to hear round here is one message: Get rid of them all, kick them out. Start afresh.”
More than 15% of people in Nièvre live below the poverty line. It has one of the lowest life expectancies in France and has lost more than a quarter of its doctors in the past 10 years as they retire and move away.
“There’s no work, there are no doctors, there’s nothing, it’s dead,” said a pensioner who said she struggled to make ends meet at the end of each month and had once turned to food banks for meals. Three-quarters of people she knew would be voting Le Pen, she estimated. She used to vote Socialist and said she had resisted voting Front National until now because she had an uncle who had been deported to concentration camps during the second world war, and she used to fear the far right posed a threat to democracy.
“But right now, to put this country back in order, Marine Le Pen is the only one up to the job,” she said. “We’ve reached saturation point.” She thought the government was putting “foreigners first” for benefits and housing, while neglecting the “misery” that French people were living in. “Britain opened its eyes with Brexit, closed the borders. We’ve got to do the same,” she said.
One retired builder had switched from Communist to Marine Le Pen – in part as a protest vote, in part because she would “get rid of” what he described as “a certain population” of immigrants, and also because “I like her a lot”. He felt she would sort out pensions and the economy.
In a country where the pollster Bernard Sananès recently said every other person now knew someone in their circle who could not find a job, more work was the chief concern of voters on Château-Chinon’s main street.
“If jobs were brought back, 80% of the other problems would be fixed,” said Didier Felzines, who owned a bike shop. “The rise of racism would be sorted too, because why do people become scared of others? Because there aren’t any jobs left … As soon as a foreigner arrives, they say: ‘Oh no, he’s going to take the jobs’. If there were more jobs, people would be happy to see foreigners, there would be no more fear.”
Harold Blanot, 30, is a forestry trader from a village in Morvan, where he said his family of woodcutters had lived for generations. He joined the Front National aged 18 because he supported the 2005 no vote in France’s referendum on the EU constitution and because of the urban riots that spread through housing estates that year after the death of two boys hiding from police.
He was now canvassing for Le Pen and running for a parliamentary seat in the June legislative elections that will follow the presidential vote. “This is forgotten France,” he said while leafleting in Château-Chinon market. “The real misery is in the countryside. In Nièvre and Morvan a few decades ago, there was small industry — manufacturing, charcuterie, textiles. It has slowly shut … The Socialists have been here since after the war, but it has led to disaster... People want to turn the page and the solutions the Front National are proposing are having an impact.”
Guy Doussot, the Socialist mayor of Château-Chinon, said the rise of the Front National locally was symbolic of a rise of the far right all over France. “It worries me,” he added. He accused the party of playing on the issue of immigration. Locally he felt there had been a growing and “unjustified” negative view of families who were connected to a training centre for imams in a village nearby because they wore Muslim dress in the town.
Across Nièvre, in the market of Fourchambault, a small town of 4,500 people, Pascal Leguen was standing at his wine stall. He voted for Sarkozy in the previous presidential election, but said he would now switch to Le Pen.
“Two-thirds of French people just don’t want the traditional political parties any more, they want change,” he said. “There’s less and less work in France, and politicians can’t keep sticking their head in the sand.”
With fewer jobs available for the French, foreigners should not be allowed in, he said. “When there’s no more bread at home, you don’t invite in your neighbours.”