On April 10 and 24, the French will elect their president for a new five-year term. Immigration, insecurity, identity, purchasing power: France has been shaken for five years by major social fractures, which are shaking the political world. The duty went to take the pulse of the electorate in a few towns and villages, far from the circles of Parisian power.
On the departmental road which leads from Questembert station to Bohal, in the department of Morbihan, we do not see the slightest electoral sign. Here, life follows its course, far from the political controversies that agitate the big cities less than two weeks before the first round of the presidential election. Yet it is here, in this peaceful town of 800 inhabitants, that it all began.
That was a little over three years ago. In her little white pavilion with a gray roof, Jacline Mouraud listened that morning to the morning radio interview with Jean-Jacques Bourdin. In the tone of the perfect technocrat, the brand new Minister of the Environment, François de Rugy, announced, with a smile on his lips, an increase in taxes of seven centimes per liter on diesel as well as the authorization to introduce tolls at entrance to towns. ” It was too much. I couldn’t stand this contempt any longer. I exploded. Here, you can’t do anything without your car. To go to work, we are not going to do 60 kilometers on a scooter! »
We were in October 2018. To earn a living, at the time, this mother played the accordion of old hits by Patachou and Arletty in dancing teas. To complete each month, and barely earn 1000 euros, she was also a fire safety guard and did hypnotherapy to help people quit smoking. Needless to say, she had no choice but to travel 25,000 kilometers a year. “When I was a security guard, I had to do 184 round trips to earn 80 euros. With the rise in gas prices, it was no longer worth going to work! »
Ulcerated by the minister’s remarks, Jacline immediately recorded a video rant on Facebook. In simple language, she said she was “full of boots” with “tracking drivers”, which involves reinforced technical controls, the rising cost of diesel and the multiplication of radars. “Here, the nearest town is 17 kilometers away and the first airport 100 kilometers away. »
As soon as her video is online, Jacline Mouraud thinks that her life will resume its course, but it is quite the opposite that occurs. Quickly, the phone starts ringing: his four-minute clip has gone viral. It will be seen more than six million times. With Priscillia Ludosky’s petition against rising fuel prices and Eric Drouet’s calls to block the roads, he was going to set fire to the powder.
A month later, on November 17, 300,000 demonstrators dressed in yellow vests blocked tolls and roundabouts all over France. Widely supported by the French – at the beginning, at least – this movement will last 15 long months and will become the highlight of Emmanuel Macron’s five-year term.
If many Yellow Vests came from the left, this was not the case for Jacline Mouraud. Today rallied to the party of Eric Zemmour, Reconquest, the one who has been nicknamed “the Madonna of the Yellow Vests” wants to embody “the social wing” and represent these territories abandoned by the Republic.
A bakery and a tobacco bar
In Bohal there is no post office, only a bakery and a tobacco bar. And again, it only survives because it was helped by the town hall. A perfect example of these semi-rural and peri-urban areas abandoned by the state, as documented by the work of political scientist and geographer Christophe Guilly.
“Here, all the businesses are on the razor’s edge,” says Mme Mouraud. It is not normal that we cannot make a living from our work. For that, we must repatriate the billions that have been spent for 40 years in the suburbs populated by immigrants, while we have nothing. »
Symbol of these territories which feel despised by the Parisian administrations, 17 kilometers away, the small town of Questembert has been fighting for several years against the owners of three giant wind turbines. These monsters, whose blades of 62 meters each reach almost the height of Place Ville-Marie (180 m), are perfectly visible from the station, located seven kilometers away. At night, because of the turn signals located at the end of the blades, the landscape resembles that of an airport.
There are already nine wind farms in the region; at night, from her terrace, Raymonde Le Bars sees two of them. “It looks like an airliner circling above the house but never landing,” says neighbor Brigitte Chobe. “Obviously, our houses have become unsaleable,” she concludes. But who cares ? »
After years of struggle, some local residents who rent their homes risked losing the Gîtes de France label. On February 15, the opponents however won their first victory in court by demonstrating the harmful effects of these devices.
In this presidential election, several candidates, such as Éric Zemmour and Marine Le Pen, supporters of nuclear power, have proposed, in the name of landscape protection, to stop the construction of wind turbines. The candidate of the Les Républicains party, Valérie Pécresse, wants to slow down the construction by insisting on the agreement of the local populations.
“We talk about it because it’s the presidential election,” said Raymonde Le Bars. But then what will we do? »
A land of right
Unlike the rest of Brittany, Morbihan has long been a land of the right. By the way, M.me Pécresse is the only one of all the candidates to have held a public meeting there since the start of the campaign.
It is in these often abandoned regions without services that more and more inhabitants of the large local town, Vannes, are forced to find accommodation. “With the arrival of the TGV in Vannes in 2017, the price of accommodation has increased by 50%”, explains Catherine Lozac’h, journalist for the daily The Telegram. “On the Rhuys peninsula, we can no longer accommodate the staff who take care of the aging population. People are forced to go and live in the second or third ring. Of this, the presidential candidates do not speak. »
In just a few years, the region has become a champion of urban sprawl. It is perhaps no coincidence that, after experiencing a strong presence of yellow vests, Vannes has hardly known a Saturday without an anti-vaccine demonstration since last July. “The tenacity of these activists surprised us,” says Catherine Lozac’h.
The mistrust of “people who are nothing”
This does not surprise political scientist Luc Rouban, who has just published The reasons for mistrust (Science Po Press). Compared to other countries, France remains “the country of political distrust in Europe”, he says.
According to him, the latter covers a deeper social divide than elsewhere, but which we do not always understand. “The left has understood nothing of the revolt of the yellow vests,” he said. She imagined that they were asking for more redistribution. On the contrary, they demanded less taxes. It was a right-wing revolt, ignoring the unions, and not anti-capitalist rhetoric at all. It was rather the fight of a part of the middle class who was afraid of falling back into poverty. »
Hence the incredible awkwardness of a president who has repeatedly used a contemptuous vocabulary to speak of these low-income earners, underlines the political scientist. Like when, on June 29, 2017, Emmanuel Macron distinguished between “people who succeed and people who are nothing”. “It was terribly awkward,” says Luc Rouban. Because, in this election, there is an issue that goes beyond the right and the left. Are we heading towards a very Europeanized and more individualistic society at the risk of a deeper divide? »
According to the researcher, contrary to what one might think, it is not the working classes, who are said to be populist, who demand verticality, but the upper classes.
Emmanuel Macron’s words about those who “are nothing”, Jacline Mouraud remembers them as if it were yesterday. “I don’t know a single president in the world who could have said like him that he wanted to ‘piss off’ part of his population. If he comes back, he won’t be five years old. Don’t be fooled by the calm of our countryside: it can all start again at any time…”