Are RN candidates in bad shape? According to Release, which drew up a list of racist candidates, attacks against the left and the “bougnoules”, the far right is freewheeling in France before the first round, and xenophobic speech released by the proximity of an electoral triumph. This “selection of the ugly” is all the more disturbing since Marine Le Pen’s party is trying by all means to display the smoothest possible face, which allowed it to become the first party in the country in the recent European elections and in the voting intentions for these anticipated legislative elections.
The latest poll (Le Monde/Ipsos, conducted on June 27-28 among more than 10,000 voters), gives the National Rally and its “ciottist” LR allies 36% of voting intentions, ahead of the New Popular Front at 29% and the Ensemble de la majeur présidentiel group at 20%. Absolute majority in sight and capture of Matignon by the RN? We will know the following Sunday, July 7, after a hellish week of arbitrations, promises, alliances, betrayals and withdrawals (or not). The “triangulars” will be numerous between the three poles (left, center, extreme right) that have emerged from the express recomposition of the political landscape. By the pollsters’ own admission, no one at this stage is capable of providing reliable projections.
But let’s get back to our black sheep.
On the floor in Vichy
Are the RN candidates spinning bad cotton? In Vichy, it would not be out of place, since the spa town in the Allier department gave its name to a famous checked fabric – but also to octagonal digestive pastilles (900 tons per year), and especially to a despicable political regime instituted on July 11, 1940, more difficult to digest. And since it is on the road, barely out of Corrèze, and after having quickly skirted the chain of volcanoes of Auvergne in Puy-de-Dôme, here we are already in this town with its old-fashioned, slightly chilling style: Maréchal, here we are.
Okay, you have to have a bad mind to only look for RN candidates in a place called Vichy. Or demonstrate, on the contrary, great historical vigilance. Still, barely installed on a bench in the Parc des Sources which is being completely renovated (to please UNESCO, which has classified it as a World Heritage Site, the city is investing 100 million euros to renovate its pavilions Baltard, its hotels, its thermal facilities), we are looking for this individual:
- Rémy Queney, 55 years old, single, diplomat in office, RN candidate in the 3rd constituency of Allier (Vichy). Part of the “Horaces”, a circle of senior civil servants, advisors and senior business executives who work – often anonymously – for Marine Le Pen. Excerpt from his profession of faith in the local newspaper, The mountain: he hears “contribute, through the will of voters, to constitute a large parliamentary majority which will allow Jordan Bardella to form a government of national unity capable of restoring France.”
We find his contact, and that of the RN section in the department; we call, several times, without answer; and leave one, then several, messages, audio and written: email, SMS, WhatsApp, LinkedIn… Hours of waiting. No return.
The silence of the countryside
The RN candidates never answer, they hug the walls. In Chartres, in the first days of our trip, a 22-year-old student invested by the party had let us down. In Blois, the local RN section had led us up the garden path, and in Corrèze, it was almost useless to look for the Le Pen candidates that no one “never sees on the ground”, we were told. So what? Is there a deliberate avoidance strategy? Do the orders come from above, from the training staff in Paris, aware that the candidates are not all at the required level, and that, worse, some may utter horrors that will then have to be laboriously presented as simple errors? In a word: is the RN moving forward masked or is it me who is imagining things, annoyed at having been snubbed so far by the evanescent candidates?
A Google search with the words “RN + invisible” allows me to come across an informative article from Orne Journalin Lower Normandy, entitled “The strange strategy of the National Rally in Orne”. We learn that the RN is leading a “silent campaign”that his two candidates are the only ones not to have responded to the newspaper, that they remain “unreachable and untraceable” and do not even reside in the department. That public information about them is “simply non-existent”despite extensive research. And that the party headquarters in the department “did not respond to requests.”
That in France we see things like this
A few dozen kilometers further, after crossing hilly fields finally crushed by the summer sun, therefore harvestable, and in fact immediately harvested, here we are in the north of the Loire department, which we do not fail to cross at the height of Roanne. Rather than the motorway, we follow the legendary Nationale 7, on the edge of which the Château d’Ailly, in Parigny, looks so proud that we decide to spend the night there after discovering, we can’t hide anything from you , that the squire rents rooms on Booking.com. Alec de Brosses was an investment banker in Germany, and then one day, 25 years ago, he inherited the estate, which had been in the family for nearly three centuries. A punishment, more than an inheritance: 100 hectares, 70 rooms, and outbuildings.
To survive, and repair the roof, you have to rent every weekend for weddings or business seminars. There is also the sale of wood, but there things get complicated: “France has become a horribly complicated country, explains the Count of Brosses. First I have to differentiate between cut wood and fallen wood, it’s not the same VAT. And then there is now this new tax from the wood interprofessional organization, the CVO. Do you know what that means? Compulsory voluntary contribution. Voluntary AND compulsory. It’s only in France that we see things like this.”
For those who are interested, the CVO of public and private forest owners amounts to 0.5% of the amount of standing timber sales, 0.33% for timber sold roadside, 0.25% for timber factory delivered or 0.15% for wood energy.
The Cornouille Point
The aristocrat of the N7 does not really want to follow us in a political discussion on the tensions of the moment. He prefers to talk to us about his famous dogwood jam, of which he is one of the very few producers in France. Gifted with extraordinary patience since the small red fruits must be picked by hand, and pitted one by one, with little flesh around the stone. “The dogwood tree flowers very early in the year and produces small fruits with a grenadine flavor”he explains before specifying that cornel jam goes well with game, the opposite would have disappointed us.
In the 1990s, Alec de Brosses launched a competition to distinguish the best recipe for corneilles. The call was broadcast on national radio and “housewives from the four corners of the country sent their recipes”. On the jury tasked with sifting through the sixty or so proposals sat chef Pierre Troisgros of the homonymous restaurant in Roanne*, “capable of reading these recipes like scores. One look was enough for him to know whether the recipe could produce a great dish or completely miss the mark on the product.”recalled the count a few years ago in the columns of Point* which devoted a summer series to the Nationale 7. There remains so much to discover about cornwall. But we have to get back on the road to complete the journey.
Totally “overbooked”
Are RN candidates spinning bad wool? In Bourg-en-Bresse (Ain), we try our luck one last time in order to solve the enigma of these repeated Arlesian women. Call to a certain Christophe Maître, merchant and opposition municipal councilor. In The Voice of Ainit presents itself as “the representative of early-rising France” and wants to defend, once elected to the National Assembly, key themes “like immigration, security and purchasing power”.
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Hello, I am a Swiss journalist in Geneva, just next door, and I have a few questions about the election campaign in your constituency…
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(Dry tone) No. I only respond to local media, not national or international ones.
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Oh, and who decided that? The party?
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Yes, yes that’s it… Well, no, it’s me. In any case, I am overbooked in the field with my teams.
“Teams” that are all the more numerous because no one is able to come across them to count them. Enough. It’s time to bend the saplings. In Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, the homonymous general must be turning in his grave.
