French Letter: Town and country divided in their visions of the future

The French are sticklers for the privacy — one might even say, the sanctity — of the ballot box. If you inquire who got their vote in Sunday’s first round of the presidential elections, they look at you as if you had asked them how their constipation was coming along. On Monday, one man I spoke to told me he didn’t even know which way his wife had voted. 

At the polling station in Le Touquet, where Citizen Macron is registered, the President and his wife, having established their credentials and disinfected their hands, were filmed dutifully picking up separate slips for each of the 12 candidates, only one of which would be placed in the envelope provided and deposited in the urne. 

This was so that no one could know for certain which of the democratic dozen had secured their vote.   

Having performed their civic duty, the First Couple then had their election registration cards stamped and were free to leave. I’m guessing they both opted for the incumbent, meaning that they wouldn’t have to move house in May, but the fact is, I have no way of knowing. 

I asked the owner of a Breton bar why they didn’t just include all the names on a single ballot sheet, like they do in most other countries. She didn’t know. My assumption is that it makes the count a lot quicker and more obviously accurate, which is also true of the Exit polls — though how Ipsos, the Paris-based market research giant, gets around the constipation conundrum is something I have yet to fathom. 

Brittany, where my wife and I live — permanently disenfranchised by virtue of our foreign resident status — is supposed to be a hotbed of dissent. The 3.3 million inhabitants of the peninsula (4 million if you include the “lost” department of the Loire Atlantique) are preternaturally suspicious of authority, especially if it derives from Paris. 

Yet on Sunday, as in 2017, Macron topped the poll across the region, winning 32.79 per cent of the vote (against 27.84 per cent nationally), well ahead of the Far-Right’s Marine Le Pen, on 19.53 per cent and the Marxist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, on 20.65 per cent. Eric Zemmour, the even further-right candidate, limped home, on 4.91 per cent, behind the leader of the Greens, Yannick Jadot, who managed to conjure up an impressive 6.19 per cent of the Breton total. 

Had this pattern been repeated across France, Macron would already be cracking open the champagne, and Le Pen would have been drowning her sorrows. But, of course, it wasn’t. Instead, though the President, heading his politically pliable En Marche movement, came out ahead, he was closely followed by Le Pen, with Mélenchon, as the second-round kingmaker, in third place.   

What, though, I hear you ask, of the good folk of Plusquellec, my home commune, halfway between nowhere and somewhere else, next to Finistere (literally the End of the Earth)? Did my neighbours follow the region’s liberal trend? No, they did not, because this, you will not be shocked to learn, is where town and country diverge. 

In Rennes, the Breton capital, one of the trendiest towns in France, just an hour and a half from Paris by TGV, the arch-lefty Mélenchon won a resounding 36.13 per cent of the vote, with Macron second on 29.47 per cent and Jadot (the Green) third, on 9.96 per cent. Le Pen and Zemmour were nowhere. 

Now, look what happened in Plusquellec, with its 354 registered voters. This is how the top four finished: 

Macron: 16.76 per cent

Mélenchon: 22.83 per cent 

Le Pen: 27.46 per cent

Jean Lassalle (the son of a shepherd, from the Pyrenees): 6.94 per cent

One-two-three for left, right and centre. 

The turnout was high – just short of 81 per cent. The only consolation, if you are a liberal, is that here, too, Zemmour barely moved the dial. Plusquellecois may want a firm hand on the tiller; they don’t want a nutter.

Just an ass’s roar from Plusquellec, the smaller but otherwise near-identical parish of Locarn, sees things differently. Its 410 residents are, for some reason, supposed to be deeply conservative — the sort of people who keep their yellow jackets in their cars, where they belong, and don’t wear them to make a political point. 

In 1991, the commune, strung out along the twisting Gorges de Corong, was chosen as the location for a business-oriented think tank, L’Institut de Locarn, which two years ago came under new direction after charges of élitism but provides employment for a number of the locals.

In Locarn, while Macron, Le Pen and Mélenchon took the top three places locally, the surprise was that Valérie Pécresse, the mainstream conservative, who lost her deposit nationally, and Lassalles, a conservative dissident, between them won nearly 19 per cent of the popular vote and were thus almost popular. 

Who knows how these differences occur!  

My neighbour, Jean-françois, a member of Plusquellec’s village council, was thrilled by Sunday’s result — so much so that he even owned to having voted for Le Pen. When my wife expressed her concern that France could be about to tear itself apart by electing the leader of the National Front as President, he smiled indulgently. Chacun a son avis! — “We all have our views”. 

And so the circus moves on. Joyeuses pâques!