Marine Le Pen, leader of France's far-right National Front, doesn't typically draw votes from people like Marius Pigoni, reports The Wall Street Journal.
For decades, the 80-year-old sawmill owner voted for moderate politicians who espoused the European ideal of building an economic bloc free from the nationalist forces that drove the continent into two world wars.
But as people in the European Union's 28 member countries vote on a new European Parliament, Mr. Pigoni's focus is a worry that his sawmill business will be ruined by low-cost imports, including from Eastern Europe.
Ms. Le Pen is leading a campaign to abolish the EU. She is getting Mr. Pigoni's vote.
"As someone who saw the war, I can tell you the EU was a great idea," he said. "But now it's become a farce. We're broke and we're offering billions to Ukraine."
Like Mr. Pigoni, many Europeans have fallen out of love with mainstream political parties and their technocratic creation, the EU.
The EU, they say, has become a bureaucratic machine that excels at dispensing edicts on how cheese is labeled while ignoring everyday problems such as unemployment and illegal immigration. By some polling estimates, myriad anti-EU groups could nearly double their tally in May 22-25 voting from the last European Parliament election five years ago by taking as much as a quarter of the seats.
Casting the EU as public enemy No. 1, Ms. Le Pen and other nationalists are presenting themselves as credible alternatives to Europe's mainstream, pro-EU leaders, and no longer as mere loudspeakers for protest voters.
"The EU nowadays is like the U.S.S.R.: It can't be improved. We need to let it crumble and build after it a Europe of free and sovereign nations," Ms. Le Pen said in an interview at the National Front headquarters just outside Paris.
Having expanded her National Front's following in France, she is setting out to unite Europe's disparate nationalist parties into an anti-EU caucus at the European Parliament—one that could stall the decadeslong march toward a United States of Europe.
The formation of a potent anti-EU minority would also pose a risk to EU policies some economists consider important to restoring growth. One likely target: an ongoing effort to forge a trans-Atlantic free-trade agreement.
That wouldn't bother Ms. Le Pen. She calls the effort "pure folly."
Read more of this report from The Wall Street Journal.