Marine Le Pen’s success began in a former mining town. Now her message is seducing French society – Winnipeg Free Press

HENIN-BEAUMONT, France (AP) — In the former mining town at the heart of French far-right leader Marine Le Pen’s political strategy, her party’s electoral success Sunday came as no surprise to the hundreds of supporters who gathered to hear her victory speech. The same promises of bringing back good jobs and overthrowing the political elite that have long resonated here found a national audience.

Marine Le Pen set up shop in the northern town of Hénin-Beaumont in the early 2000s, hoping to woo voters disillusioned with the new economy and tired of decades of socialist local government. It was the start of a decade-long effort to detoxify her anti-immigration National Rally and appeal to voters across French society.

Several waves of industrial closures have left the unemployment rate above the national average, and 60% of the population earns so little that they do not need to pay taxes, according to INSEE data. The construction of a gigantic shopping mall on the outskirts of Hénin-Beaumont has emptied the town, and dozens of shops, hairdressers and restaurants remain empty.

In 2013, the city’s socialist mayor, Gérard Dalongeville, was sentenced to four years in prison and a 50,000 euro fine for embezzlement of public funds.

“There was a winning cocktail,” including the corruption of the mayor and the closure of factories, believes Edouard Mills-Affif, filmmaker and author of two documentaries on Hénin-Beaumont and the rise of its far-right mayor, Steeve Briois.

Marine Le Pen easily won her own race for a parliamentary seat in the first round of voting on Sunday, garnering more than 64% of the vote in the city. Because she won more than 50% of the vote, she will not have to run in the second round on July 7.

Overall, the National Rally and its allies won a third of the vote nationwide, according to official results, ahead of the left-wing New Popular Front coalition and President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist party. Sunday’s results give a broad picture of each side’s performance, but they do not indicate how many seats each group will ultimately win.

Yet for the first time since World War II, a parliamentary majority for a party like Le Pen’s is within reach.

Although France has one of the highest living standards in the world, an unemployment rate at its lowest level in decades and a crime rate relatively low compared to its peers, discontent is simmering in some parts of the post-industrial era. But for many National Rally voters, Sunday’s victory is revenge against a political class they see as out of touch with citizens and their concerns, such as crime, purchasing power and immigration.

“The French have almost wiped out the ‘Macronist’ bloc,” a victorious Marine Le Pen told her supporters in Hénin-Beaumont. The results, she added, show the “will of voters to turn the page after seven years of contemptuous and corrosive power.”

It was in Henin-Beaumont that Le Pen began her efforts to transform her father’s party from a political pariah into a voter-friendly alternative – a strategy she then sought to replicate nationally when she took over the party in 2012.

Her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, led a fringe political party that too often relied on anti-Semitism and racism to provoke and attract attention, according to Stanford University professor Cécile Alduy.

“Since (Marine) has been at the helm of the party, she has tried to soften the rhetoric, to adopt a kind of democratic rhetoric,” Alduy said. “Since 2012, it’s been a steady progression, at the ballot box and in the polls.”

Le Pen’s father, now 96, was “a little too extreme” for Magali Quere, who was born and raised in the city.

“But the National Rally doesn’t scare me,” said Quere, 54, who runs a second-hand furniture store. “It scared me 30 years ago, but not anymore.”

And it’s not just voters who are concerned, Alduy said. “Other right-wing parties have started to copy its vocabulary, its arguments or its themes, mainly around immigration and insecurity,” she said, including Macron and former French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

“This further normalizes what they (the National Rally) have to offer,” she said.

Briois, mayor of Hénin-Beaumont, elected in 2014 and re-elected for a second term in 2020 with 74% of the vote, remains a close ally of Marine Le Pen and has been hailed as a model for other National Rally candidates.

A former sales representative, his style is different from that of his predecessors. He is everywhere. “He combines marketing and advertising techniques with the oldest practices of political action, which are being in the markets, going door to door,” explains Mills-Affif, the filmmaker who followed him for months on the campaign trail.

Briois encouraged local residents to report any acts of misconduct or vandalism to him, taking photographs when they could, which he would then use in his campaigns.

Many residents of Hénin-Beaumont believe the situation has long since improved. Briois appears to have shelved some of his more extreme projects, such as creating a coalition of mayors opposed to migrants or a decree banning begging in the city centre, which his critics said unfairly targeted the Roma population.

Instead, the city renovated the church and city hall, improved the roads, and sent police to regularly patrol the streets, giving residents a sense of security.

Murielle Busine, 57, who says she is anti-National Rally, praised the work done by Briois. “I wouldn’t go so far as to vote for them, but I can’t deny everything he has done for the city, and that he is very accessible. When there is a problem, he tries to solve it.”

Now there’s Jordan Bardella, the party president and Le Pen protégé, 28, with a huge TikTok following.

“It is often said that it is the old people who vote for the National Rally. Bardella brings the youthful spirit that was missing,” explains Ewan Vandevraye, a 22-year-old student who came from Lille, around thirty kilometres away, with three friends to the demonstration in Hénin-Beaumont.

On Sunday evening, supporters did not just shout “Marine! Marine!”: men, women and young people also chanted Bardella’s name.

If the National Rally wins an absolute majority on July 7, Bardella will become the youngest prime minister in French history. Marine Le Pen has her sights set on a bigger goal: the presidency in 2027.

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Associated Press journalist Oleg Cetinic in Paris contributed to this report.