Growing grievances over a rural-urban divide help Marine Le Pen’s National Rally make inroads.
Sylvie Casenave-Péré has been in politics for exactly 10 days and she is already in the thick of France’s election race against a high-profile adversary.
The 65-year-old packaging executive is running for a seat in parliament with President Emmanuel Macron’s liberals. That pits her directly against Marie-Caroline Le Pen, the sister of far-right leader Marine Le Pen, whose far-right National Rally party is on the ascendant.
On a quiet Monday morning in the small town of Sablé-sur-Sarthe, some 250 kilometers west of Paris, Casenave-Péré is handing out leaflets and greeting shoppers with gusto: “Send me to the National Assembly, I’m super motivated!”
This new recruit is part of a desperate push from Macron’s centrist coalition to hold back the tide of the far right in the region of Sarthe in the two-round snap election on June 30 and July 7.
Heartland is a nonsense term.
It certainly could mean something, but unfortunately it seems like it’s mostly just used for advertising things to… certain people
Only ever seems to be used to describe bastions of conservative support. I wonder why.
In French we use the term “diagonale du vide” (the empty diagonal)